Behind the Scenes
But What About the Nipples? A Nice Conversation (Pt. 1)
Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had an interesting and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the second issue of We Are Champion. Over the next three days, I’m going to post that conversation and we all hope you guys join in on our conversation and share your thoughts.
Amy: I don’t know if you’ll be pleased to know that conjured your name today, Kate, over at Roxane’s gig, HTMLGIANT. A post pimping the second issue of a new mag, “We Are Champion,” doesn’t note that it’s an all-male issue or that the first one included the work of only three women. Just one tiny example of a recurring indicator that women writers still aren’t taken seriously, actively sought out, promoted, etc.
Kate: I actually thought the great majority of the conversation that went around this issue on HTML Giant seemed considered and thoughtful, both the idea of “counting” as seeming problematic, and shouldn’t it just be about the writing, and the other side problematizing how when such an inequity occurs it’s just dismissed as “this is just the best writing out there,” etc. I think it’s a worthwhile issue to explore, if there is still such an inequity in terms of numbers of women published in literary journals (or anyone not straight, white, men). I’m thinking of Juliana Spahr/Stephanie Young’s Number Trouble piece that was published in Chicago Review. I agree with Roxane that this We Are Champion that didn’t feature any women writers is a symptom of a gender inequity that might be still there in terms of innovative writing, but is not the disease itself. And that zeroing in on this one issue is not really getting at the larger context (although perhaps opening the discussion?)
Roxane: I’m a Libra so I often have many and conflicting opinions about things. I do think the all-male issue of We Are Champion is problematic but I also know that there are many factors involved in how a given issue of a magazine is assembled. While there are many, many problems with how women writers are treated, regarded, and promoted within the publishing community, I am not convinced that the second issue of a small online magazine is an indicator of a problem that is systemic, pervasive, and ongoing.
Amy: I don’t think pointing out the disparity is by any means an answer. It’s the beginning of a conversation, a query as in: ‘Why is this an all-male issue?’ Especially when it’s not promoted as such. Because the answer is so often the dismissive “It just happened that way,” which also usually means, “I don’t want to examine why.
Women are at least half the writing population and an editor doesn’t get that being an editor carries certain responsibilities, which include scouring the lay of the poetic land? What are an editor’s responsibilities when it comes to whose voices get heard?
Roxane: Different editors are going to have different opinions about what their responsibilities are. I believe it is my responsibility to be as inclusive as possible. While it is “the work that matters most,” as so many editors are fond of saying, I also think it’s more than just the work that matters. I don’t think we, as editors, can ignore considerations about the people who send us that work. I also think that we need to support and promote not only women writers but also look at the entire range of diverse writing and create a publishing culture that embraces difference without exploiting it. Believe me, that does happen, and the exploitation of difference is just as bad as the exclusion of difference.
Kate: Yes, tokenism is in a way more insidious and doesn’t get at the real issue (I like how Lily Hoang spoke to this in the comment stream, and Roxane I really like what you say about embracing not exploiting difference). Any sort of counting like that seems “corrective,” a sort of strange and cleansing term. Blake just guest-edited an online journal that I was in and that seems to be an equal distribution (gah! that sounds so fascist!) of women and men, but in keeping with what Blake likes, Blake seems to be very well read in terms of experimental women writers, I’m thinking his list at the end of the year of what he’s read, and it’s one of the reasons I still go to the HTML Giant site. It’s possible Blake asked me to contribute because I’m a woman but I think probably not. Although Blake did email me and ask me if I had anything worthwhile to submit – should more editors do that? as opposed to relying just on what comes in over the transom? Absolutely.
Blake: But I didn’t ask you, Kate, because you are a woman, or because you are white, or because of a sexual preference or other determining factor that is yes, defining of a perspective, as is gender, but for me, in the end, the least interesting thing about a piece of work. I was really fat as a child, and in my mind I still am, and to me that definition is as important to the body ID as gender is, and yet it’s irrelevant, I feel, in determining the perspective of a publication. To tend toward those elements over the work itself, what is in it of the author there, is I think not only backwards, but kind of sad. How sad if I were to have asked you for work, Kate, because you have specific sex parts, and not because I read your book and admired the hell out of what you are doing. Yes, gender is part of your ID, but so is so much else, and often those elements are totally ignored in publication profiling, and yet no one seems to raise a hand.
What if we started counting issues of how many non-white writers were in a magazine? How many homosexuals? How many raised in the South? How many who have mothers with cancer? These are perspective influencers that hold just as thick a prowess over a person’s mind as having a certain organ does. How can we catalyze all of these elements into a truly “equal” ground. We can’t. And even if we could, should every one? Is it every person’s responsibility to place the same emphasis on social determinism? If you are into that, go for it. But to me, again, I care about the work. And I don’t think having a penis means I am male gendered. In most of my relationships, I have as many female characteristics as I do male, if not more toward the former.
So what are we coming down to then? The direct presence of a penis or a vagina? That’s why I put it in that crude way in the post, which was only partially spurred by We Are Champion. This kind of shouting for emphasis on elements outside the work has always gotten under my skin. I want language, ideas, words, image, and that, for me, comes from all over, and the body is the last most important influence. This isn’t fashion or sports, where it’s all body and prowess of flex. It’s mind, light, spirit, blood.
Amy: It’s interesting, Blake, that you reduce gender perspective to the ownership of a vagina or penis, as though biological matter was the only thing that “influences perspectives,” as you put it. And yet, we live in a world where people don’t need to have those body parts to identify as male or female – I know this feels old hat by now, a la Judith Butler’s performing gender, but don’t you think that, across cultures, people have some very large and immediate ways of dividing up and the very first obvious one, within every culture, is by gender, which entails all sorts of behaviors, modes of speaking, ways of “expressing” and requirements of silence, etc? *And* one gender has historically been prioritized as the “better” or more favored one – without fail, that is almost always the male. I feel like I’m explaining something so obvious that I’m missing something. Do you really think this issue is reducible to simply having a penis or vagina? People write, behave, and speak in gender-coded ways, whether it is natural or learned or simply demanded. And certainly, other factors such as race, weight, class, etc come into play when “influencing perspectives” – no one has denied that, so why is it either/or? Don’t talk about gender differences, expectations and especially gender disparity, which is factual, because, what? It just can’t be true? Is that what you’re saying?
Sorry if I sound defensive; I just cannot believe you keep reducing this discussion to the very belittling argument of ‘penis’ or ‘vagina.’ Such reduction feels very dismissive, like an attempt to stop the discussion rather than interrogate how we are gendered in our communications, our writing, in what’s expected of us, and so many more ways. As members of that “fringe” crowd, it seems we’d want to be discussing how our writing can confound and conflate and upset the assumptions about gender as well as connect and understand such practice to the historical fact that male writers and their very gender-specific subject matters and styles have most certainly been favored (see Retallack quotes below for the general characterization of such ‘male style’). The two things, what we write and the gendered nature of our identities, are without a doubt connected.
Kate: I don’t think gender is the only way to define one’s identity. But there used to be a big inequity between male and female writers, there is still I think in the mainstream, in terms of what writers are considered “great” as opposed to marginal. I would not have wanted to be asked for work because I have specific sex parts. I do think great writing should be androgynous in a way, that’s Woolf too. I do believe gender is fluid, sexuality is fluid, all those things you’re saying Blake. I do totally get where you’re coming from. And that this conversation might be depressing, might take away from the texts, the words. But the truth is, most people still aren’t as aware of avant-garde or experimental women writers, and there has been a tremendous ideological project to marginalize women writers, to not remember them, write about them, not make them part of the canon. How many people love Jane Bowles? (well I’m sure many more readers on HTML Giant than many other places!) Versus Paul Bowles? Ann Quin versus BJ Johnson? And I think there can be something dangerous and insidious about dismissing gender as not a defining way in which people structure and divide lives, society and literature. Yes there are other things that make up our experience (like moms with cancer, like childhood trauma) that form us as writers. But a woman or a person of color is often reduced to the body, to being objects. It’s like when Sartre was talking about existentialism and how beings can transcend themselves and Simone de B and Frantz Fanon interjected that the truth of the body, the truth of experience, are different for those who are Othered in society, especially Othered physically, reduced to stereotypes because of their tits or color of their skin. I wish we lived in an ideal society. But we cannot say the conversation is not necessary where even in a literary forum like HTML Giant someone profiles a woman writer and it becomes about how fuckable or not fuckable she is, or an Ivy League women professor is reduced to her nipples.
Blake: It’s not that I’m saying that what any of you are saying isn’t true: surely, in your experience, and in many, many others’, it is not only true but intensely important, more so than those others things I mentioned and etc. I don’t unvalue that in your work or in many other contexts: however, I do think it is important to not make that gender state the centerpiece of everything, or even to insist on it having value in all spheres. It matters to you, but does that mean it has to for others? Why should that issue be at the center of all things? After all, what we’re talking about here isn’t a question of respect (outside the totally intentionally obnoxious troll behavior at HTMLGIANT, which is sort of for me beside the point, like dust at a baseball game): being more concerned with the aesthetic over the body doesn’t mean I don’t respect anybody for what they are. So, then, if your most central focus (or one of your foci) is that, great, that is yours. There are no laws. For me, it’s spheres, and politics is shit compared to opening other doors.
But what about the nipples? Can we have no sense of humor? Are these bodies so sacred that there is no poking around? Certainly in the case of Jimmy Chen, who posted the nipples post, has poked at just about everything imaginable, including me, and even if he hadn’t I don’t see why nipples can’t be examined, even if it is admittedly puerile. Lord knows Burroughs is puerile at times, Acker is, Artaud is, etc. Nothing is so sacred that it should not be played with in certain lights.
Amy: Blake, who says one cannot be concerned with gender disparities, and other political matters, as well as being interested in other writerly-issues such as aesthetics? Why do you characterize such a conversation, which is actually quite rare, as “the centerpiece of everything”? Aren’t we large-thinking humans, capable of all sorts of considerations? Why must one consideration obliterate any others for you? Isn’t this even saying that thinking can only be hierarchical (i.e. one concern or the other, not both or more)? We cannot think about writing as well as who gets published? I can only speculate that the need to trivialize these concerns to “body” and body parts, among other re-framings, is a privileged position: “I don’t have to think about these things, so why do you want me to?” As for being solicited because one has specific sex parts, I also feel such a corrective is no corrective at all and is reductive; I’m asking how are these things connected, why is that identifiably male writers are historically prioritized, published, canonical, and discussed? What is it, beyond their names and penises, about their work that is masculine? Why is that celebrated? What “feminine” aspects of a text aren’t touted in the majority? Why are writers of the feminine considered fringe or experimental? What qualities of their/our work aren’t celebrated and why?
Kate: Ahhh, the nipples post. Contrary to what he might believe, I don’t bear Jimmy Chen any ill will. It does seem to be a couple of his posts that I have personally taken issue with, so perhaps I have some issue with his sense of humor or lack thereof. I have found some of his posts witty or smart, especially his designed posts. Because that’s kind of a thing. I didn’t find at least those two posts, terribly funny. The one about the professor and the nipples just totally annoyed me, and I know others were even more offended by it. It seemed to be a laddish joke merely designed to reduce an intellectual woman to a body. People who take issue with offensive characterizations are often told to get a sense of humor – yes but what if we don’t find the characterization funny? My issue with some of the troll comments as well – for fuck’s sake be funny. If you are these things if you make me giggle even in discomfort I’d forgive you a lot. I honestly did not find the nipples post or the Zelda post funny, and you can hardly compare these posts to the transgression of Burroughs, Acker or Artaud. By why make silliness at the expense of a woman’s body, therefore alienating so many of your readers? And even if it is ha-ha, can’t we be critical about it? I’m not saying one has to be politically correct, to cleanse or whitewash humor, to never make jokes about tits (or am I? I might be saying that, and in a way I know that’s not what I mean). But to say the tits jokes aren’t nervously in some way about discomfort with the feminine or in this case with a woman in power—I think that’s again just sweeping things under the rug.
And Blake, I do respect your position. I don’t think gender should be at the center of everything. I don’t think it should always be the way we discuss literature. But it is a position of privilege. It is privileged to say that gender should be ignored or shouldn’t matter or that it’s an experience that hasn’t deeply impacted you. And an aesthetic I value is about writing the body.
Blake: All I write about is the body, and houses, which are another kind of body. I’m not devaluing the body as a commodity in the make, but saying that this social commodification of what who when what where all occurs outside the temple. In the end, what matters is what is made, not who made it.
Amy: In my estimation, experience does play some part in shaping how we learn to be, whether we successfully unlearn it or not. The temple is shaped and conditioned, growing up, by forces beyond the flesh. This isn’t essentialist; this is about being able to identify the pervasive constructs we inhabit and then figuring out how to reject them, how to be and see outside of those expectations. Writing can work for that purpose too. What the temple produces certainly may escape such societal conditioning with concerted and clever effort, but those outside forces still like to say, ‘Silence that temple, don’t publish it because it’s not doing what’s prescribed.’ Perhaps that’s where the venue for fringe or avant-garde publishing enters. And the internet, which offers loads of opportunities now thanks to low-economic risks. I’m hoping so, because our indebtedness to big publishing houses seems to mean that we’re asked to write with a push towards what ‘they’ want. I hope that’s changing too.
Back to the notion that “3 out of 18 were published, it just happened that way.” Such response makes me wonder even if editing and publishing a journal is a nepotistic venture, doesn’t that editor commune with any worthwhile female writers? It’s really not hard in the field of poetry today to locate female poets who are writing dynamic, thrilling work and position them side-by-side with similarly exciting male writers. Why segregate and publish an all-male issue now?
Roxane: These are questions that can probably only be answered by the editor of We Are Champion. You are absolutely correct that it is not hard to find female poets and writers who are doing fantastic work but as an editor of a magazine that has a reputation for being open to work from women and diverse populations, we still only receive about 30% of our submissions from women and we’ve received fewer than 20 submissions from writers of color, ever. This issue of gender equality and encouraging diversity is far more complex than knowing that these fantastic women writers or writers of color or queer writers are out there. The real problem is finding ways to connect with diverse writing communities and that’s something I’ve personally struggled with. We cannot publish that which is not submitted.
I don’t know that it is fair to say that the issue of We Are Champion we’re discussing was deliberately an all-male issue. In the comments section of the “Language Over Body” HTMLGIANT post, the editor explained how the issue came to pass and the great thing about the wide range of literary magazines out there is that editors get to choose what they prioritize and publish. As I understand it, the editor of We Are Champion chose to prioritize his aesthetic and a deadline he had imposed. I am troubled by that choice but it is his magazine and his choice. He will have to deal with the consequences, if there are any. As an editor, creating balance is really important to me, not only in terms of aesthetic but also in terms of publishing diverse writers. You have to make diversity a priority. Even though it is the writing that matters, at some point, you have to stop holding on so desperately to the idea that it’s all about the writing or nothing will ever change.
Blake: Is the only way to have diversity through flesh and organs? What about diversity in the word? When Lily Hoang and I were talking about this, she mentioned that maybe she was being naïve, but she didn’t see it as an issue for women getting published now. Like, everyone in this conversation is well published, and has been around. Even if Gene had set out to publish an all male issue, which I know he didn’t, would that be so bad? If that is what he wanted? I see humans as human. Anyone can say a word. And yet, I love all female issues also, the all female issue of New York Tyrant one of their best publications. Is framing necessary? Is fetishizing sacred? I don’t know, I just don’t see the battle here. Are people not reading females? That would seem insane, to me, to be a claim. Aren’t there bigger issues at stake than who’s in line and whose turn it is? We are all making words. What are we fighting for? Why so many labels? Where is the cake?
Kate: I think it’s still difficult for experimental women writers to be published in the mainstream. I think there has been for a while a counterculture in small presses that do publish experimental women writers and people of color. I agree with you and Lily in that. But I do think a lot more people read and valorize and fetishize more experimental or innovative male writers than women writers, at least in terms of who makes the transition to a wider audience (maybe I’m speaking to prose more than poetry). I think you’re more of an adventurous reader Blake than most.
Roxane: Wanting women writers to have equal access in publishing (and far beyond) is not about fetish. I understand where you’re coming from, Blake and I appreciate many of the points you make, but I think it’s hugely reductive to think this is just about who’s turn it is, and so on. The concerns being raised here are more about an overall pattern, a culture that is comfortable with excluding women and lots of other kinds of people. But yes, you bring up an important issue. There are all kinds of diversity and a diversity in word is also important, vital even.
And as you note, we’re all published but, that said, most of us are published with small, independent publishers. With one exception, (as far as I know), none of us have a book deal with a major publisher or an agent. There are all sorts of reasons for that and I don’t feel like my gender has kept me from being successful as a writer but what we’re discussing here is not just about being published, but also about where women (and particularly experimental women writers) are published and the access they have to the real power centers of publishing. (This is not to say you are chilling like Tom Clancy, believe me, I know that.) That’s why, as I note later, for me, the WAC issue is not the crisis point. I see it as as a symptom. I can look at myself and say, I am just as successful as this male writer or that white writer but I know I am an exception, particularly as a black woman, a double minority. I do not think of myself in this way but when I’m at an academic conference, for example, and I am the only one in the room who looks like me, I do think that framing matters. It could not be less about fetish.
Tags: nipples
This is a great discussion. I just wanted to point out one thing, which is that the editor of WAC, in the last thread, said that he had solicited eleven women and something like five men and the women, for whatever reasons, just didn’t get back to him by deadline.
I don’t know the editor of WAC… in fact I can’t remember his name (gene?), so I don’t say this in any defensive way. But I think it is relevant because much of the discussion above seems to imply that the WAC editor was completely oblivious to the gender disparity or else has a completely masculine sense of tastes. That isn’t the case if he solicited eleven women for the issue.
This is not to say that he couldn’t have done more, or pushed back the deadline till the balance was fixed, etc. Just thought I’d mention it!
Great discussion though!
interesting read. re: “In the end, what matters is what is made, not who made it.”: I happen to hold the opposite position, but I respect yours, Blake. I think I have “shifted” from somewhere in between your position and the opposite to the opposite in the last year or so. I might also believe something along the lines of “What an artist makes IS the artist, in some way, to some degree.” Finally, I had this random phrase go through my head last week, something like “The maddening thing is, Art does not exist.”
If Poppy Z. Brite was in the last issue of WAC would it have still been “all-male”?
i just watched tyra take a shit all over sasha grey on youtube
tyra shit on sasha grey?
festishized.
i am really weirdly obsessed with sasha grey
Ladie’s need to stop IMPATIENCE,
for to get down and WRITE.
***WORDES ARE THE BIG FIRE***
wimin r naturally worse cus they have evolvd 2 have babies not 2 rite wich is for men who do not have babies cus they have more imprtnat things 2 do like riting while wimins do babiees
I’m interested in a point Roxane raised.
“As I understand it, the editor of We Are Champion chose to prioritize his aesthetic and a deadline he had imposed. I am troubled by that choice but it is his magazine and his choice. He will have to deal with the consequences, if there are any.”
When you have submissions, interviews, etc., from a variety of writers, is holding to a deadline really all that problematic? Don’t editors have a responsibility to their submitters to get the work out in a timely fashion? I’ve seen the issue of “the deadline” brought up several times as a very troubling thing, and I have difficulty seeing what is unreasonable about holding to the deadline.
Discussing the numbers of women published versus the numbers of men is actually the very thing that reduces gender to penises and vaginas. It is that very act of counting that proclaims that gender is nothing more than being born a certain way, and NOT about how being born that way encodes and inscribes itself on the person and then how that translates on the page. Why, on this site, do we only talk about gender as a numbers game? THAT is what I find reductive. And why are the numbers all about how many published? What about these numbers:
1. Thus far in my career, I have been solicited by 11 male editors and 1 female editor.
2. At a reading this past weekend at which the crowd was around 50/50 male/female, my chapbook was purchased by 5 men, 0 women.
3. At the WAVE table at AWP, I bought 5 books by women (4 that I chose and 1 suggested by a woman), 1 book by a man (suggested by a man).
I’m NOT saying these prove some kind of opposite point. But they are different kinds of gender numbers that seem to offer other angles at looking at this thing.
And that’s just numbers. Representation. Personally, I think representation comes near the bottom, in terms of usefulness and interestingness, of ways to talk about gender. But for some reason it’s the only one that really comes up. I’m so much more interested in the messages about gender, the meanings, in the work itself. Or about how audiences respond to the way a work deals with gender. I am so achingly fascinated by gender, so staunchly positive that being a woman is complicated and hard and wonderful. So despairingly certain that in lots of ways this world tries to limit me more than it limits males (although of course the same goes for other identity markers). I want to talk more about all of that.
And I will. I hope someone will join me in talking about something other than statistics. I mean, why are we writers if we’re uninterested in all those things that numbers can’t capture?
to clarify the first paragraph a bit: I am taking issue with the claim that counting numbers of women and men is the same as counting up the representatives of certain perspectives on gender, or even certain gender perspectives. This is not the case. THIS is what reduces us to what genital is inside our skinny jeans.
I don’t think holding to a deadline is unreasonable but I also think that deadlines are fairly flexible, particularly in online publishing, that’s all.
Say what you want, but Harper Perennial is a motherfucking boys’ club. How is it that writers as dangerous and diverse and prolific as Kate Zambreno, Amy King, and Roxane Gay (to name only a few of the terrific writers writing today) have not been quickly signed by HP? Is it because their stuff is not “urban” enough? Not “memoir-ish” enough? Not “craft-y” enough? Not “darkly experimental” enough? What the fuck is it?
Writers: align yourself with people like Amy Scholder and Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman. They do daring stuff. They support daring stuff. They, like you, know what’s up. One more thing, writers: go further. The boys never go far enough, which is probably why they get published so regularly by places like HP. Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.) Anyway, ignore them. And go there. Explore all the desires they refuse to explore (and there’s a lot of them) any way you want to explore them.
And now that I’m feeling even more humorous, when do we get to have “small dick day” on the GIANT? It’s fun to laugh at nipples (not kidding). It’s fun to laugh at small dicks (still not kidding). Blake, since you probably have more experience with both (and a better sense of humor than most), you should post it!
You’re absolutely right that we should extend the conversation beyond statistics. We start to do that in parts 2 & 3 but more broadly speaking, I’d love to engage in a conversation about messages about gender and I’m super interested in how audiences respond to the way a work deals with gender.
There are a lot of rad women writers on Harper Perennial. Rebecca Curtis, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Peele, etc.
Have you looked at their author lists?
uh, metaphorically
i would watch tyra shit on sasha though
Janey – You are totally saying what I was too much of a chicken to say, what I skirted around in terms of whether experimental women writers are published in the mainstream. And yes to aligning oneself to Amy Scholder, Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman, I would add to that Lidia Yuknavitch and Vanessa Place. The answer is to radicalize, to go further. And to hopefully still get published.
me2
“I am so achingly fascinated by gender, so staunchly positive that being a woman is complicated and hard and wonderful.” – I think that’s really beautiful, Amy. I agree with what you say about numbers, how it’s a limiting discussion. And I don’t think numbers really gets at the complexity of how the body is involved in creation and publishing, can the body be androgynous in the act of creation, can the body disappear, is the body limited, is the woman’s body limited, how can a text reflect gender, refract gender, how is a text by a woman read differently, responded to differently, is that the truth anymore. These are the interesting questions. To me as well.
I’d like to hang out with Janey Smith.
Why does HP’s website which I just went to as a result of this look so fucking shitty?
As for all this nipples/dicks business, I have intentions of starting a video magaine some time soon where authors read their works in the nude.
there are tons of women authors published by hp. i think maybe you’re being funny.
the issue of experimental women writers not getting enough exposure in the mainstream is dwarfed by the issue of not enough experimental writers of any gender getting exposure. Who would you consider an experimental writer in the mainstream? Ben Marcus & Diane Williams. Are there others? Are they any? What is the ‘mainstream’? I think there are as many hempels and williamss and schutts and lydaviss as there are etcetera.
this whole discussion feels petty. women’s rights should be hashed out in realms where it really matters, like in 3rd world countries or salary discrepancies. The arts are always going to be open to diversity because its where we go when we’re frustrated by real injustices. If there are discrepancies, than it is because of biases, which i dont think anyone even denies. i have a bias for male litearture because I’m male. Sorry. Sheesh. But tryin to get to the root of these biases which I see as perfectly normal instead of talking about real injustices only etceteras itself etcetera etcetera
Look, HP certainly isn’t knocking on my door either, but I wouldn’t go so far as to denigrate those among us who’ve been or will be published by them by saying they’re not “daring” enough. That’s certainly not fair. There are daring male writers. There are daring female writers. Yes, sure, radicalize. Absolutely. Yes, please. BUT, but to reduce all this down to sex is problematic, highly problematic. I’m a fucking broken record, but come on. Let’s not ignore the truth that even IF writers like Vanessa or Lid sign on with HP, issues of race, class, EDUCATION, etc. still loom, and if anything, they become even more obvious obstructions.
an addendum: what i mean is that less if any radical woman writers that i admire have gotten agents, have been published in the “majors.” and that the woman writers being published in the mainstream are maybe still quite innovative and wonderful and brilliant but perhaps not terrifying in the way, say, blake’s writing is terrifying (in a good way). is the answer that woman just don’t write that way? i don’t think that’s true. a work like vanessa place’s la medusa or dodie bellamy’s letters to mina harker would never have been published by harper perennial or fsg or whatever, and the publishing climate is even more asthmatic now in terms of radical writing. why is that? the only exception i can think of in terms of “dangerous” women writers (writing rigorously and scarily about the body) getting published by the big leagues, what roxane calls the real power centers, is kathy acker with grove press. or mary gaitskill.
yeah I dunno, HP seems to put out a ton of women and knocking their entire author list as not daring in this way seems silly since what is Janey really saying except two HTML giant men have been picked up and no women have? There is a huge amount of rad literature out there beyond the scope of htmlgiant contributors and commenters though….
HP actually seems like one of the most daring publishers, as far as the “mainstream” goes.
“The boys never go far enough […] Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.) Anyway, ignore them. And go there.”
Oh, cringe, cringe, cringey cringe for you
yes race and class and education still loom of course (those who can afford to get MFA’s, etc., went to certain schools). but i was agreeing with Janey Smith that HP seems like a boy’s club, and that the answer can be to align oneself with editors who support daring work. i don’t think that’s denigrating to point that out. I don’t agree that that means that those who are published on major presses aren’t daring enough.
diane williams, yes, as well.
Christine Schutt (Harcourt)? Lydia Davis (FSG)? Dawn Raffel (Scribner)? Miranda July (Scribner)? Rebecca Curtis (HP)?
There are some rad women writers getting published out there.
(i say that more to give a shout out to some rad women writers than to claim there is full gender balance in publishing, which there surely isn’t…I’m not sure the balance is more off in “dangerous” writing than in more traditional fiction though)
I mean, honestly, whether this is a joke or not, it’s excruciating and slightly embarrassing to read.
I’m not disagreeing with anything else you said, since I know nothing about Harpers Perennial. I’m assuming that it is indeed as you say. If they really are more reluctant to take on edgy writers, or less wont to do so when those writers are women than when they’re men (both of which, I suppose, are likely enough), then that’s a great shame. The whole icky-boy-snark thing, however — again, whether it was a joke or not — adds nothing to the debate, and I think the whole conversation is the worse for it.
Thank you guys all for having this discussion. It’s nice because things seem to get so quickly polarized during gender discussions and I really, really hate that. I feel so torn and in the middle because I’ve had good experiences with male editors and also with female editors, and have never really felt excluded or at a disadvantage because of my gender–and because I tend to agree with Roxane, based on my very short time as an editor, that a lack of female submitters seems to be at the root of the problem. But I can see both sides, and I feel very passionately about gender equality (and in fact run into some really hideous inequality almost every day in my work life. Anybody seen this shit about the Walmart lawsuit? So, yeah.)
But. I am also often troubled during these discussions because I feel like women complain (rightly) about stereotypes, but then go on to impose their own stereotypes or limitations on others of their gender. I was really offended, for example, when someone during the last discussion on WAC, made a comment about how “bearded” all the WAC influences were, and several people agreed and blasted Gene for that. It just so happens that I decided to submit to WAC (before this whole craziness) based on the awesome writing AND on those very influences. I don’t see why things like Back to the Future (awesomeness) and Basquiat (one of my favorites) are supposed to be only for men somehow. Anyhow, if I made a list of my influences, honestly, they would mostly be male, too. Not because men are better writers, but because men have just been afforded more opportunities to write and publish until fairly recently. I just don’t see how we can’t acknowledge that reality without somehow having that fact reflect badly on the men who were writing when most women couldn’t. I can recognize the hideous unfairness of the past while still enjoying Pound and Beckett. I just don’t see why that’s wrong.
At the same time, I do think we need to acknowledge that things have not been fair in the past and are probably still not fair now, to some extent, and that people do have bodies, even writers do exist in a corporeal world and like Amy says, those bodies are not just penises and vaginas but fat and skinny and black and brown and strong and weak and all, all of that makes us who we are and what we write. How could it not?
i would add susan sontag, fsg published the benefactor in 1963. pretty huge, i think.
i’ve been reading american genius and like it a lot. it reminds me of speedboat by renata adler, which i really dig. la medusa is the last tome i bothered to read. loved it lots. i feel that, if she were a man, (obviously it wouldn’t be the same book) but could probably have been published by someone like paul slovak at viking. just sayin. i’m glad there is a real discussion going on here.
yeah, i keep tryin to think of a list maybe, and my list heavily skewed toward women, when i think about ‘experimental writers in the mainstream.’ who are experimental male writers in the mainstream that push fiction as innovatively as the women do? i can think of ben marcus and not a whole lot of others.
david markson, i suppose, but i’ll see your markson and raise you a stein
I think there are a lot of rad “experimental” (heavy quote use there, not sure how experimental all the authors we are listing necessarily are) on big publishers. But it isn’t barren for women I don’t think.
I love Lydia Davis, I was obsessed with Christine Schutt’s earlier work (which seems a lot more radical than her later work the book Harcourt published). But I still will stand with what I said, as a casual observation. That works by women which are dangerous (I’m using Janey’s term because I like it) are sometimes seen as scarier for big publishers to publish, especially since publishers or agents have “chick lit” or “women’s lit” divisions. By the way, I don’t think my own writing is dangerous. I hope to write dangerous works someday. Or that I necessarily deserve to be published by a big publisher. And I realize that not many publishers are publishing experimental lit at all, so in a way, this issue is a bit pointless. But I will tell you, every agent I queried for a novel that’s still unpublished compared me to other women writers, never to male writers, even one agent that compared the work to The Bluest Eye, which is an amazing amazing work, a million times better than my own novel, but the works are obviously nowhere similar (except that this was a popular literary work that experimented with language, especially at the beginning, and was written by a woman). I think there’s big time gender bias with agents and publishers, and they are often looking for novels by women that can be “molded” into chick lit or quirky chick lit or “women’s lit.” That’s just been my experience with my novel. Maybe with short stories or poems it’s a different experience.
I actually don’t think Janey was being serious.
possibly this is the most dull debate that it people still go over and over
oh women dont get published enough
oh yes they do
not as much as they should do
why is there a ‘should’
who knows
i dont know
lets find someone that knows
there are whole presses devoted entirely to publishing females
none devoted entirely to publishing men
‘positive discrimination’
okay….
because women dont get published enough
oh right, gotcha
everyone hates vaginas
Darby diversity does matter in the arts. And we’re hashing out these issues as they pertain to the arts because this is an arts website not a global forum or something like that. Come on. Context.
i don’t think janey knows how to be serious
i am trying to respond to darby’s comment! gertrude stein self-published so i don’t know if that would really fit in. david markson, yes. i am really thinking of the system novelists – pynchon, delillo, gaddis, gass, then dfw (who i think is amazing, but i’m just saying).
i agree that the icky-boy-snark thing adds nothing to the debate. i got that janey smith was joking about that. i thought she was serious about aligning oneself with editors like chris kraus and amy scholder.
What does “feminine” writing look like? What does “masculine” writing look like? Can anyone give me some specifics? Have any studies been done which test how well people can distinguish between things written by men and things written by women?
And yet here you are…
then, hooray!
That’s a good question. I recently read a book that the press’s editor told me had been referred to in blurbs as “masculine” writing but I didn’t really get the sense that the collection was overly “masculine” save that each story’s protagonist was a man and a a lot of the stories in the collection involved baseball. It led me to wonder if masculine writing is characterized by subject/matter or is it also a certain kind of prose.
I once had a creative nonfiction teacher who told me he prefers muscular prose and I think he meant masculine prose. I’m still parsing that out, too.
“Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.”
Also, I think laughing at sex organs is dumb. Probably not immoral, but dumb.
are you concerned that there aren’t more system novels published by women?
I would suggest that a magazine that only received 30 percent of its submissions from women – and 20 percent from minorities – is probably not doing enough to be interesting/seen as friendly to those populations. I only submit to magazines that are interested in things I am interested in – so, for instance, if the issue is all about men feeling alienated from their wives/girlfriends/fathers/sons/the wilderness I’m probably not going to submit.
Something to talk about here that might be interesting is content versus gender. Does one gender write about one kind of content? Say, video games, science, comic books? I happen to be female and interested in all those subjects.
because that’s a valid concern, i think. do we not put the work that williams and davis and schutt and etc. do in the same category?
I’m really surprised by your statement, Kate.
i didnt say diversity in the arts doesnt matter. i said the arts is open to diversity more than in other realms.
i apologize for like, veering slightly out of the controlled subject we’re discussing here. i was trying to provide a little Context to examine the relative seriousness of this discussion, how big of a problem is this in the grand scheme. that’s off limits though, okay. good to know.
ugh
its fun to watch pointless things sometimes, like sport
Oh stop being a drama queen. I’m not saying the discussion cannot veer. I’m just saying I think it’s okay to talk about diversity in the arts even if it isn’t on the same scale as say pay discrepancy or the global position of women. Gah.
darby (i’m totally fucking up this reply feature) – yes, i am really talking about novels, that’s what i write and know. i wouldn’t put davis and williams in the same category, no. contemporary system novels are some of the only experimental novels supported by big ny publishers, all written by men. have women written large tomes? yes. miss macintosh my darling, la medusa, the making of americans. an argument could be made that publishers are all about the money and they support these works because they have an already built-in readership, but i’m not sure that if a woman had written pynchon’s v and sent it in over the transom or a woman had written infinite jest it would be published. then. and certainly not now. you could make the argument that infinite jest or v wouldn’t be published now, anyway. that is I think a very valid point. the idea of a large genius tome is viewed usually as a man’s creation, however. in my very limited perspective. even if we take out the question of length, I think it’s difficult in general to have “experimental” (I hate this term, for lack of a better) novels published by big publishers, but more risks have been taken with male writers at least historically. And women novelists in that world are often especially now expected to write “women’s fiction.” Would Mrs. Dalloway be seen as “women’s fiction” now? I don’t know. As I write this I get bored with myself and this issue. I think the answer is to write, that’s why I was responding to Janey Smith’s comment positively, even though yes some of the divisive aspects not so much. I don’t sit and boo-hoo about this. But I have had a lot of trouble getting this one novel published – but so have many worthy writers on HTML Giant, so to make it all about gender, I’m sure, can chafe. It’s not all about gender, of course (although big publishers, again, do segregate novels often by gender). It could be that my novel isn’t good enough. I think that’s a total possibility. I should also add that the novel I am referring to, the one which I did send around, is very “feminine,” in that it is set in a department store in London and is kind of an existentialist novel dealing with a shopgirl and is a larger text. So it’s possibly why I have been pigeonholed or haven’t had success.
stop being snarky then. ‘Come on. Context.’
Statistics are important to include in the discussion because it directly rebuffs claims like “X publishes lots of women” or “Women are winning most of the awards.” The statistics show that in many cases that’s simply not true, despite one’s perception. Like women are running the workplace, when actually they make .70 on every $1 a man makes. Sure, it’s not as dire as other situations for women in the world, but judging on how pissed some people get when women bring up this topic, I think there’s plenty of room for women to feel a bit pissed too. If there’s nothing wrong with publications to be mostly or completely men, why is it wrong to point that FACT out? Why is it wrong to point out that such publications are niche and perhaps lack appeal to a large segment of readers?
Sometimes the statistics really highlight how skewed a perception might be. We also have to be careful about assuming our own experiences and perceptions are somehow the norm. Our personal statistics may be very different from many others. Especially if you’re one of the few exceptions in publications that drastically skew in a certain direction. If you have the perception that you’re frequently invited to send work because you are X, perhaps that is true, and if that is true, why is it that you’re one of the few writers who are X that these editors ever think to solicit? Do they know the work of other X writers? Are you one of the few good X writers out there? Is it ignorance of the work being written by Xs or is it the belief that there just aren’t many good X writers? There was a long time when one might have had the perception that the only “good” Latina actresses were Jennifer Lopez or Salma Hayek, because they were the only ones who seemed to be getting any substantial roles.
Yeah, I get the impression Blake is familiar with and interested in the works of many women writers based on the books he writes about on HTMLGIANT. I do not get that impression from some of the other editors participating in the discussion a couple weeks ago, the ones who were like, um, all I can think of is Ayn Rand and Getrude Stein. Since Blake is both well read and intelligent, he should be able to recognize these other editors’ limitations. He doesn’t say, “no dude, you have to read these 20 writers,” no, it’s a flippant “genitalia counting” dismissal and anyone who doesn’t find that HILARIOUS has no sense of humor. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, I failed to see the funny.
I love how Blake’s point was swiftly neglected. To argue against reductionism and then insist upon prioritizing gender over the myriad other outside influences that condition experience is itself reductionistic, even if you deny that’s what you’re doing. Any discussion that starts with “3 of 18” prioritizes gender in a mind-numbingly flat way. (And I am NOT saying that we shouldn’t perhaps prioritize gender over certain other Othering experiences; I’m simply saying that that discussion is not what’s taking place here.) How many of those 18 first contributors to WAC are obese? How many are black? How many have been hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder? For how many is English a second or third language? How many earn less than 20,000 a year? How many have bad teeth and cannot afford braces? How many can’t pay their rent? How many donate to charity? How many have extensive facial scarring, or how many stutter?
—. . .You know what? At a certain level, the individual editor cannot give a damn. She must carefully develop her own powers of aesthetic evaluation and then ASSERT them, come what may. If you find Gene’s assertion of his own aesthetic capabilities “problematic” (ugh), then READ THE MAGAZINE PROVIDE AN EFFING CRITIQUE; CHALLENGE HIM TO DEVELOP FURTHER AS A THOUGHTFUL READER OF ART. Do not hide behind “3 of 18,” especially when the sample size is so insignificantly small. (Do not mistake me for denying the fact that women’s work is often undervalued: it is, and it’s shitty. Our society progresses by only the tiniest of intervals, and the Othering experience that a given female artist endured 100 years ago is not that different from the same prejudice her own work endures in the present. But just as shoddy art inevitably succumbs to historical oblivion despite even the fiercest contemporary cheerleading (Hello, Jon Franzen!), truly great art can and will withstand the worst of our society’s ill treatment and hate. Work always to make the lives of women less hellish, of course, but do not pity the art. If the art is strong enough, it will take care of itself.)
I don’t think Blake asserted the privileged position; he didn’t say gender does not influence him. He questioned why it ought to be only one of a few criteria involved in the evaluative process. IMO, that’s fair game, because while there are many realms wherein the nuanced discussion of outside social conditioning can be fascinating, when we read for literary pleasure this is flat-out not what we read for. To a certain extent we must know them since they constitute the very rules of the game, but to the solitary reader they are very nearly interchangeable: we would still read and love Hamlet even if the outside force he was contending with were not his father’s commandment to kill his uncle. If Hamlet were a modern-day obese adolescent who everyday contended with whether or not to stand up to his ruthless blockhead bullies at noon recess, we would love him just as much so long as his interior force of character remained the same. We read in search of the human anima, not for what determines it.
On the pussipo list I brought up the issue of exclusion of poets with obvious disabilities. Roxanne, you seem particularly interested in diversity. Is disability on your radar when you publish? I find that even all-women’s conferences/athologies don’t include poets with disabilities.
Sorry if this is old hat to some.
Anon/Roxane, I was asking myself the same question. Do the words, to the reader, bear the vestiges of gender, or of any other characteristic of the author. Because I become genuinely confused by this conversation somewhere between body and politics: do we want to see some notion of the feminine, of womanhood, reflected to a greater/more prismatic degree in what we read? Or do we want to see more women published, to even the scales in a census kind of way? Can men write the feminine? Can women write the masculine? Do we want them/us to try?
And of course it seems that, in terms of numbers, we’re mostly talking here about lit mags/”literature”/experimental writing. Because there are a lot of women, writing about bodies, being published by mainstream presses. (Self-help? Eating disorder memoirs? Sexual escapades? Romance novels?) Do we not like these books? We do not like these books for this discussion.
Roxane, for me anyway, “muscular prose” conjures litheness, agility–not masculinity, at least not exclusively, at all. But again, it’s a good question–what *is* masculine prose? Content, or form?
Oops, I meant to ask for an explanation of the quoted statement.
i wasn’t joking.
“there are whole presses devoted entirely to publishing females
none devoted entirely to publishing men”
Maybe not a press, but there is a journal.
http://www.bullmensfiction.com/
It’s possible that he meant compact prose. Condensation of meaning. Etc.
Though likely he meant “not too many words. Do not qualify. Do not challenge me.” Yawn.
There are computer programs that pretty accurately guess gender by a writing sample. Like here: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php and http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html
There have been a lot of studies on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/2vwc9uc
I have been told that I have an overtly feminine writing style and I believe that to be true.
Disability is actually on my radar but I have to admit it is newly on my radar because a good friend of mine was recently diagnosed with a disorder that completely changed her physical abilities. She’s now pursuing disability studies and I’ve started learning more about it by way of my friendship with her. I am by no means a paragon of inclusion as an editor. It’s truly something I am working on and trying to be better about.
sport as pointless is a funny internet comment.
i’m chewing on this gender thing.
I have so many stacks of books on my desk i will read this summer. I never thought about gender. But I’m the reader. You are discussing the other end. The creation of…
I know I am in love with lydia davis
why are you surprised?
Sport as pointless also kind of captures the spirit of this discussion, I think.
Sport is not pointless.
Writing is sport.
Ok, that comment was triggered by your comment in this interview: “But what about the nipples? Can we have no sense of humor?”
I really do think I have a sense of humor, but I get the strong that sense that these comments are trying to derail the conversation into inanity–which is more off-putting.
Wow, the Gender Genie is pretty cool. However, I ran this comment and your comment below through the system and it is pretty sure you’re a male.
It’s too small of a sample! :)
Why do you hold that position?
If I am riding the bus, I am certainly more concerned with what was made than who made it. I mean, yes, if the bus was constructed by wageless laborers who were whipped ceaselessly and fed only kitty kibble, sure, I am concerned about that. But as I am riding the bus I am primarily concerned with what was made. —Will it keep me safe? Will it get me to where I am going?
Would you ride (and pay the fee for riding) a slow and unsafe bus that was made under generous, ethical, relaxing, and well-paid conditions?
Ideally of course we want and need both—but which do you sacrifice, should you need to choose between them? Do I bemoan the conditions it was made in and begrudgingly ride the well-made bus, or do I cheerfully ride the bus that may kill me?
I’m aware, of course, that what I’m presenting is 99% of the time a false dichotomy. Rarely if ever would similar circumstances arise for an editor choosing between artwork. But I think there is some value to it, in how how it helps us realize what we value more than something else.
I ran the the whole of roxane’s blog through it. It says she is 55% male, and probably European.
This is a great discussion. I just wanted to point out one thing, which is that the editor of WAC, in the last thread, said that he had solicited eleven women and something like five men and the women, for whatever reasons, just didn’t get back to him by deadline.
I don’t know the editor of WAC… in fact I can’t remember his name (gene?), so I don’t say this in any defensive way. But I think it is relevant because much of the discussion above seems to imply that the WAC editor was completely oblivious to the gender disparity or else has a completely masculine sense of tastes. That isn’t the case if he solicited eleven women for the issue.
This is not to say that he couldn’t have done more, or pushed back the deadline till the balance was fixed, etc. Just thought I’d mention it!
Great discussion though!
I want to second that Blake writes about houses
Awesome. Must be all the foul language.
I dunno, it was in response to someone who mentioned the nipples.
I think the nipple thing is hard to figure out. I didn’t see the post, but I don’t think “Hah, look, prominent nipples!” is necessarily so malevolent. Dumb, yeah, but evil (maybe) only if part of a larger trend of hatred.
Though of course maybe the post was bout more than an arbitrary professor’s nipples. If it carried undertones of “Look at this edumacated woman with her pokey nipples, she should be put in her place,” then I get the offense.
I put some posts from my blog and it pegs me as a dude, but it recognizes my poems as written by a woman. My blog has a mustache, awesome.
Huh, it said I was 62% male. The text I used as source, I assumed it was in a more “feminine” style.
i definitely don’t think the nipples think was the least bit evil.
thing. ugh.
this probably all starts drifting toward the discussion below of what is masculin and what is feminin literature. the system novels seem masculin. are there long novels that aren’t system, and is there a market for it? we get close to making this an even tighter numbers game now, where its not just the number of women writing, but the number of words a writer outputs. Do women like pynchon? did any women read and enjoy gravity’s rainbow? i don’t compare what williams is doing to this, but can we compare the simple fact that williams is niching her own? is Pynchon better than Williams? it seems that the more experimental writing is, the more it gets pigeonholed into tiny vagina feminin and gigantic phalus masculin, but i dont know if its necessarily unbalanced. there aren’t any men in mainstream doing what williams does to that level of sucess, and why is that success not comparable?
For the record, I quite like Gene’s magazine and Kate and I, in particular, do voice throughout the conversation that WAC is a symptom, not even remotely the problem.
Wasn’t White Teeth kind of paraded as a updated variation on the “system novel”? (Or no? I’m not very clear what is meant by system novel.)
i too appear to be a weak and/or european male
Yeah, in my little rant there I guess I was mainly thinking of the prior discussion wherein several posters indicted the mag on the basis of the contributor’s list alone.
And for what it’s worth, I haven’t read it and don’t intend to. Gene’s response to the criticism was so whacky (making fun of someone’s forehead??) that I’m not interested in his creation.
ive never heard system novel either but i like that. i like systems. i’m thinking of it as novels that use the sonata principle, from wikipeedia… ‘the shift away from the idea that each movement should express one dominant emotion (see Affekt), to a notion of accommodating contrasting themes and sections in an integrated whole.’
Kristen, for me, I do not need to see more notions of the feminine in writing (though I am interested in thinking about writing as gendered). I often think it would be so limiting to creativity to try and regulate subject matter, to try and adhere to strictures of the masculine and feminine in the content itself. While statistics are only so useful, I am very interested in increased representation in terms of the author. I have a certain, faith, I guess, in the creative spectrum to know that there will always be, as Blake calls for (and rightly so) a diversity of the word.
Thank you for sharing your understanding of muscular prose. It is a phrase I see used often and I always wonder do they mean masculine or just… muscular.
darby – not a big fan of the term “tiny vagina feminin,” mostly because that seems really about the sex parts, and when I think of feminine writing as an aesthetic, I’m not excluding male writers, I think I say that somewhere in this forum-thing later on. but you are talking about market, and a lot of this is market. women novelists are often pigeonholed in the market. why aren’t longer experimental novels by women published more by big publishers? of course there are exceptions. and even though i far prefer diane williams, you cannot nearly measure the success of pynchon with williams, if you are talking about the market, etc. i mean there’s been academic conferences devoted to pynchon. he was a simpsons character. it’s not about a numbers game for me.
interesting read. re: “In the end, what matters is what is made, not who made it.”: I happen to hold the opposite position, but I respect yours, Blake. I think I have “shifted” from somewhere in between your position and the opposite to the opposite in the last year or so. I might also believe something along the lines of “What an artist makes IS the artist, in some way, to some degree.” Finally, I had this random phrase go through my head last week, something like “The maddening thing is, Art does not exist.”
That all makes sense. Knee jerk reactions all around.
If Poppy Z. Brite was in the last issue of WAC would it have still been “all-male”?
Your blog is in drag!
demi-puppet – yes zadie smith would certainly be a writer who is seen part of that group with martin amis, david foster wallace, etc. popular writers who are more experimental.
i think of system novel as a big beast of a thing.
Roxann,
I am so happy. Thank you. Do you (or others?) find it hypocritical that women who are marginalized exclude other groups? I went to the Lifting Belly conference where a poet was actually hostile about including disability. I’ve also been to women’s events that are non-wheelchair assessible. This really gets to me because women with disabilities are so much more profoundly excluded that ‘able’ women.
Jen
Maybe I should start describing the writing I like in physiological terms. “I like fat writing—I love to fondle the love handles.” “I like lanky writing.” “I like writing with brown eyes.”
Jennifer, I do find it hypocritical. I think that marginalized people (again, I implicate myself) are often the worst at creating true coalitions with other groups and instead engage in oppression olympics. I have it worse! No I have it worse! It’s a really difficult black hole to pull free from because it’s easy to be myopic about the ways in which you might be marginalized. This sort of inability to create coalition and act inclusively is a real problem.
i love ‘tiny vagina feminin.’ its my new favorite.
im getting silly with this discussion. when does it end? why do we have to keep having it over and over at htmlgiant. HTMLGIANT: The Internet Gender-Issues Magazine Political Blog of the Future.
guess i can just quit out. think i will. so long.
A deadline is named because of its inflexibility. As in ‘dead’. Think ‘hardline’, only harder. Like rigor mortis. Or something like that.
But ‘system’—does this suggest a kind of epic scope? What makes a system novel “system,” and not just long?
i just watched tyra take a shit all over sasha grey on youtube
Also, I think the word ‘problematize’ is maybe just a bad idea.
tyra shit on sasha grey?
festishized.
i am really weirdly obsessed with sasha grey
It is, particularly in that it’s not a real word but I’m an academic and by law, I have to use it frequently and inappropriately.
Ladie’s need to stop IMPATIENCE,
for to get down and WRITE.
***WORDES ARE THE BIG FIRE***
Hear, hear, Amy. I believe that what you say about representation and ratio cuts to the crux of this argument (which I see as its inherent and incredible weakness.) When we boil things down to their numbers, we miss the point.
That’s not – emphatically not – to dismiss gender bias in any way, shape, or form. Merely to say that if WAC issue 2 was a rip-snorter of a read and contained more women writers than men, it would be fine with me. If it was a partially good read because they had to get the ratio right, I am less inclined to be interested or even curious. Same goes for political representation and the like. I’m not confronted by female leadership, authority, or of dominance (in terms of higher ratio) in the political sphere by women or any other sphere for that matter. I believe in meritocracy and in the best person for the job. And why not the same in the less relevant world of poetry publishing?
yes epic not lyric. virgin suicides is lyric. middlesex is epic. but regardless of whether system or not, i will still maintain that experimental novels by women are less published in the big publishing world.
Just as a point of fact, Gertrude Stein was published by Knopf from the early 30s.
wimin r naturally worse cus they have evolvd 2 have babies not 2 rite wich is for men who do not have babies cus they have more imprtnat things 2 do like riting while wimins do babiees
Really? Or are you being facetious? I plan on someday going to grad school. Assuming you’re serious, what happens if you don’t use it?
would having a small dick count as a disability?
If it’s small enough to impede sex.
I’m being partly facetious. It’s a word I’ve gotten in the habit of using to discuss my research, for example, but I can and do recognize that it is a mostly empty word.
If you don’t use it, you lose a finger. They start with the thumb.
i am an academic, too.
what does this mean.
a mobile home is a home that moves.
a trailer home is a home that movies.
what am i saying.
“Like women are running the workplace, when actually they make .70 on every $1 a man makes.”
This stat isn’t really accurate. The last government survey showed single women working the same job with the same experience get .94 cents per dollar a man makes. So a discrepancy, but small.
The .70 cent thing has to do with men working higher paying working-class jobs, specifically construction, carpentry and so on and women tending to work part-time over full-time or take significant time off of their careers to raise children.
Anyone want to weigh in on fat studies?
http://www.nyupress.org/books/The_Fat_Studies_Reader-products_id-11104.html
How are we to determine the weight of submitters to magazines?
I’m interested in a point Roxane raised.
“As I understand it, the editor of We Are Champion chose to prioritize his aesthetic and a deadline he had imposed. I am troubled by that choice but it is his magazine and his choice. He will have to deal with the consequences, if there are any.”
When you have submissions, interviews, etc., from a variety of writers, is holding to a deadline really all that problematic? Don’t editors have a responsibility to their submitters to get the work out in a timely fashion? I’ve seen the issue of “the deadline” brought up several times as a very troubling thing, and I have difficulty seeing what is unreasonable about holding to the deadline.
Discussing the numbers of women published versus the numbers of men is actually the very thing that reduces gender to penises and vaginas. It is that very act of counting that proclaims that gender is nothing more than being born a certain way, and NOT about how being born that way encodes and inscribes itself on the person and then how that translates on the page. Why, on this site, do we only talk about gender as a numbers game? THAT is what I find reductive. And why are the numbers all about how many published? What about these numbers:
1. Thus far in my career, I have been solicited by 11 male editors and 1 female editor.
2. At a reading this past weekend at which the crowd was around 50/50 male/female, my chapbook was purchased by 5 men, 0 women.
3. At the WAVE table at AWP, I bought 5 books by women (4 that I chose and 1 suggested by a woman), 1 book by a man (suggested by a man).
I’m NOT saying these prove some kind of opposite point. But they are different kinds of gender numbers that seem to offer other angles at looking at this thing.
And that’s just numbers. Representation. Personally, I think representation comes near the bottom, in terms of usefulness and interestingness, of ways to talk about gender. But for some reason it’s the only one that really comes up. I’m so much more interested in the messages about gender, the meanings, in the work itself. Or about how audiences respond to the way a work deals with gender. I am so achingly fascinated by gender, so staunchly positive that being a woman is complicated and hard and wonderful. So despairingly certain that in lots of ways this world tries to limit me more than it limits males (although of course the same goes for other identity markers). I want to talk more about all of that.
And I will. I hope someone will join me in talking about something other than statistics. I mean, why are we writers if we’re uninterested in all those things that numbers can’t capture?
to clarify the first paragraph a bit: I am taking issue with the claim that counting numbers of women and men is the same as counting up the representatives of certain perspectives on gender, or even certain gender perspectives. This is not the case. THIS is what reduces us to what genital is inside our skinny jeans.
I don’t think holding to a deadline is unreasonable but I also think that deadlines are fairly flexible, particularly in online publishing, that’s all.
is there a “fat bias” in literary publishing? how many fat writers were published in the second issue of WAC?
do ex-fatties count even if they can pass as a never-fatty?
Say what you want, but Harper Perennial is a motherfucking boys’ club. How is it that writers as dangerous and diverse and prolific as Kate Zambreno, Amy King, and Roxane Gay (to name only a few of the terrific writers writing today) have not been quickly signed by HP? Is it because their stuff is not “urban” enough? Not “memoir-ish” enough? Not “craft-y” enough? Not “darkly experimental” enough? What the fuck is it?
Writers: align yourself with people like Amy Scholder and Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman. They do daring stuff. They support daring stuff. They, like you, know what’s up. One more thing, writers: go further. The boys never go far enough, which is probably why they get published so regularly by places like HP. Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.) Anyway, ignore them. And go there. Explore all the desires they refuse to explore (and there’s a lot of them) any way you want to explore them.
And now that I’m feeling even more humorous, when do we get to have “small dick day” on the GIANT? It’s fun to laugh at nipples (not kidding). It’s fun to laugh at small dicks (still not kidding). Blake, since you probably have more experience with both (and a better sense of humor than most), you should post it!
You’re absolutely right that we should extend the conversation beyond statistics. We start to do that in parts 2 & 3 but more broadly speaking, I’d love to engage in a conversation about messages about gender and I’m super interested in how audiences respond to the way a work deals with gender.
yeah that response was pretty a-holish and knee jerk. definitely. no sarcasm here. and i took the time out to apologize to elisa and hope that we had some positive conversation regardless of it. ill-tempered and stupid.
There are a lot of rad women writers on Harper Perennial. Rebecca Curtis, Rachel Cusk, Lydia Peele, etc.
Have you looked at their author lists?
uh, metaphorically
i would watch tyra shit on sasha though
Janey – You are totally saying what I was too much of a chicken to say, what I skirted around in terms of whether experimental women writers are published in the mainstream. And yes to aligning oneself to Amy Scholder, Chris Kraus and Lynne Tillman, I would add to that Lidia Yuknavitch and Vanessa Place. The answer is to radicalize, to go further. And to hopefully still get published.
me2
“I am so achingly fascinated by gender, so staunchly positive that being a woman is complicated and hard and wonderful.” – I think that’s really beautiful, Amy. I agree with what you say about numbers, how it’s a limiting discussion. And I don’t think numbers really gets at the complexity of how the body is involved in creation and publishing, can the body be androgynous in the act of creation, can the body disappear, is the body limited, is the woman’s body limited, how can a text reflect gender, refract gender, how is a text by a woman read differently, responded to differently, is that the truth anymore. These are the interesting questions. To me as well.
Blake? Anon is asking and you once dissed my authentic admiration of nachos by saying your were an ex-fat
I’d like to hang out with Janey Smith.
Why does HP’s website which I just went to as a result of this look so fucking shitty?
As for all this nipples/dicks business, I have intentions of starting a video magaine some time soon where authors read their works in the nude.
there are tons of women authors published by hp. i think maybe you’re being funny.
the issue of experimental women writers not getting enough exposure in the mainstream is dwarfed by the issue of not enough experimental writers of any gender getting exposure. Who would you consider an experimental writer in the mainstream? Ben Marcus & Diane Williams. Are there others? Are they any? What is the ‘mainstream’? I think there are as many hempels and williamss and schutts and lydaviss as there are etcetera.
this whole discussion feels petty. women’s rights should be hashed out in realms where it really matters, like in 3rd world countries or salary discrepancies. The arts are always going to be open to diversity because its where we go when we’re frustrated by real injustices. If there are discrepancies, than it is because of biases, which i dont think anyone even denies. i have a bias for male litearture because I’m male. Sorry. Sheesh. But tryin to get to the root of these biases which I see as perfectly normal instead of talking about real injustices only etceteras itself etcetera etcetera
Look, HP certainly isn’t knocking on my door either, but I wouldn’t go so far as to denigrate those among us who’ve been or will be published by them by saying they’re not “daring” enough. That’s certainly not fair. There are daring male writers. There are daring female writers. Yes, sure, radicalize. Absolutely. Yes, please. BUT, but to reduce all this down to sex is problematic, highly problematic. I’m a fucking broken record, but come on. Let’s not ignore the truth that even IF writers like Vanessa or Lid sign on with HP, issues of race, class, EDUCATION, etc. still loom, and if anything, they become even more obvious obstructions.
an addendum: what i mean is that less if any radical woman writers that i admire have gotten agents, have been published in the “majors.” and that the woman writers being published in the mainstream are maybe still quite innovative and wonderful and brilliant but perhaps not terrifying in the way, say, blake’s writing is terrifying (in a good way). is the answer that woman just don’t write that way? i don’t think that’s true. a work like vanessa place’s la medusa or dodie bellamy’s letters to mina harker would never have been published by harper perennial or fsg or whatever, and the publishing climate is even more asthmatic now in terms of radical writing. why is that? the only exception i can think of in terms of “dangerous” women writers (writing rigorously and scarily about the body) getting published by the big leagues, what roxane calls the real power centers, is kathy acker with grove press. or mary gaitskill.
yeah I dunno, HP seems to put out a ton of women and knocking their entire author list as not daring in this way seems silly since what is Janey really saying except two HTML giant men have been picked up and no women have? There is a huge amount of rad literature out there beyond the scope of htmlgiant contributors and commenters though….
HP actually seems like one of the most daring publishers, as far as the “mainstream” goes.
“The boys never go far enough […] Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.) Anyway, ignore them. And go there.”
Oh, cringe, cringe, cringey cringe for you
yes race and class and education still loom of course (those who can afford to get MFA’s, etc., went to certain schools). but i was agreeing with Janey Smith that HP seems like a boy’s club, and that the answer can be to align oneself with editors who support daring work. i don’t think that’s denigrating to point that out. I don’t agree that that means that those who are published on major presses aren’t daring enough.
diane williams, yes, as well.
Christine Schutt (Harcourt)? Lydia Davis (FSG)? Dawn Raffel (Scribner)? Miranda July (Scribner)? Rebecca Curtis (HP)?
There are some rad women writers getting published out there.
(i say that more to give a shout out to some rad women writers than to claim there is full gender balance in publishing, which there surely isn’t…I’m not sure the balance is more off in “dangerous” writing than in more traditional fiction though)
I mean, honestly, whether this is a joke or not, it’s excruciating and slightly embarrassing to read.
I’m not disagreeing with anything else you said, since I know nothing about Harpers Perennial. I’m assuming that it is indeed as you say. If they really are more reluctant to take on edgy writers, or less wont to do so when those writers are women than when they’re men (both of which, I suppose, are likely enough), then that’s a great shame. The whole icky-boy-snark thing, however — again, whether it was a joke or not — adds nothing to the debate, and I think the whole conversation is the worse for it.
Thank you guys all for having this discussion. It’s nice because things seem to get so quickly polarized during gender discussions and I really, really hate that. I feel so torn and in the middle because I’ve had good experiences with male editors and also with female editors, and have never really felt excluded or at a disadvantage because of my gender–and because I tend to agree with Roxane, based on my very short time as an editor, that a lack of female submitters seems to be at the root of the problem. But I can see both sides, and I feel very passionately about gender equality (and in fact run into some really hideous inequality almost every day in my work life. Anybody seen this shit about the Walmart lawsuit? So, yeah.)
But. I am also often troubled during these discussions because I feel like women complain (rightly) about stereotypes, but then go on to impose their own stereotypes or limitations on others of their gender. I was really offended, for example, when someone during the last discussion on WAC, made a comment about how “bearded” all the WAC influences were, and several people agreed and blasted Gene for that. It just so happens that I decided to submit to WAC (before this whole craziness) based on the awesome writing AND on those very influences. I don’t see why things like Back to the Future (awesomeness) and Basquiat (one of my favorites) are supposed to be only for men somehow. Anyhow, if I made a list of my influences, honestly, they would mostly be male, too. Not because men are better writers, but because men have just been afforded more opportunities to write and publish until fairly recently. I just don’t see how we can’t acknowledge that reality without somehow having that fact reflect badly on the men who were writing when most women couldn’t. I can recognize the hideous unfairness of the past while still enjoying Pound and Beckett. I just don’t see why that’s wrong.
At the same time, I do think we need to acknowledge that things have not been fair in the past and are probably still not fair now, to some extent, and that people do have bodies, even writers do exist in a corporeal world and like Amy says, those bodies are not just penises and vaginas but fat and skinny and black and brown and strong and weak and all, all of that makes us who we are and what we write. How could it not?
i would add susan sontag, fsg published the benefactor in 1963. pretty huge, i think.
i’ve been reading american genius and like it a lot. it reminds me of speedboat by renata adler, which i really dig. la medusa is the last tome i bothered to read. loved it lots. i feel that, if she were a man, (obviously it wouldn’t be the same book) but could probably have been published by someone like paul slovak at viking. just sayin. i’m glad there is a real discussion going on here.
yeah, i keep tryin to think of a list maybe, and my list heavily skewed toward women, when i think about ‘experimental writers in the mainstream.’ who are experimental male writers in the mainstream that push fiction as innovatively as the women do? i can think of ben marcus and not a whole lot of others.
david markson, i suppose, but i’ll see your markson and raise you a stein
I think there are a lot of rad “experimental” (heavy quote use there, not sure how experimental all the authors we are listing necessarily are) on big publishers. But it isn’t barren for women I don’t think.
I love Lydia Davis, I was obsessed with Christine Schutt’s earlier work (which seems a lot more radical than her later work the book Harcourt published). But I still will stand with what I said, as a casual observation. That works by women which are dangerous (I’m using Janey’s term because I like it) are sometimes seen as scarier for big publishers to publish, especially since publishers or agents have “chick lit” or “women’s lit” divisions. By the way, I don’t think my own writing is dangerous. I hope to write dangerous works someday. Or that I necessarily deserve to be published by a big publisher. And I realize that not many publishers are publishing experimental lit at all, so in a way, this issue is a bit pointless. But I will tell you, every agent I queried for a novel that’s still unpublished compared me to other women writers, never to male writers, even one agent that compared the work to The Bluest Eye, which is an amazing amazing work, a million times better than my own novel, but the works are obviously nowhere similar (except that this was a popular literary work that experimented with language, especially at the beginning, and was written by a woman). I think there’s big time gender bias with agents and publishers, and they are often looking for novels by women that can be “molded” into chick lit or quirky chick lit or “women’s lit.” That’s just been my experience with my novel. Maybe with short stories or poems it’s a different experience.
I actually don’t think Janey was being serious.
possibly this is the most dull debate that it people still go over and over
oh women dont get published enough
oh yes they do
not as much as they should do
why is there a ‘should’
who knows
i dont know
lets find someone that knows
there are whole presses devoted entirely to publishing females
none devoted entirely to publishing men
‘positive discrimination’
okay….
because women dont get published enough
oh right, gotcha
everyone hates vaginas
Darby diversity does matter in the arts. And we’re hashing out these issues as they pertain to the arts because this is an arts website not a global forum or something like that. Come on. Context.
i don’t think janey knows how to be serious
i am trying to respond to darby’s comment! gertrude stein self-published so i don’t know if that would really fit in. david markson, yes. i am really thinking of the system novelists – pynchon, delillo, gaddis, gass, then dfw (who i think is amazing, but i’m just saying).
Technically, I believe Bull published fiction for men, not necessarily by men.
i agree that the icky-boy-snark thing adds nothing to the debate. i got that janey smith was joking about that. i thought she was serious about aligning oneself with editors like chris kraus and amy scholder.
What does “feminine” writing look like? What does “masculine” writing look like? Can anyone give me some specifics? Have any studies been done which test how well people can distinguish between things written by men and things written by women?
And yet here you are…
then, hooray!
That’s a good question. I recently read a book that the press’s editor told me had been referred to in blurbs as “masculine” writing but I didn’t really get the sense that the collection was overly “masculine” save that each story’s protagonist was a man and a a lot of the stories in the collection involved baseball. It led me to wonder if masculine writing is characterized by subject/matter or is it also a certain kind of prose.
I once had a creative nonfiction teacher who told me he prefers muscular prose and I think he meant masculine prose. I’m still parsing that out, too.
“Go further. The boys are afraid. (It’s no big deal, really. Biologically, they were just made that way.”
Also, I think laughing at sex organs is dumb. Probably not immoral, but dumb.
are you concerned that there aren’t more system novels published by women?
I would suggest that a magazine that only received 30 percent of its submissions from women – and 20 percent from minorities – is probably not doing enough to be interesting/seen as friendly to those populations. I only submit to magazines that are interested in things I am interested in – so, for instance, if the issue is all about men feeling alienated from their wives/girlfriends/fathers/sons/the wilderness I’m probably not going to submit.
Something to talk about here that might be interesting is content versus gender. Does one gender write about one kind of content? Say, video games, science, comic books? I happen to be female and interested in all those subjects.
Some people have mentioned taking other “otherizing” factors into consideration. Gender, however, is often relatively easy (not always) to spot by name.
Unless you happen to know writers with a variety of unique traits or make blanket requests like “we’re looking for more people with disfiguring skin conditions,” how on earth would anyone be able help increase the representation of any group (other than ones that are hinted by name)?
The content of the story (the work) and content of the person (the person) might be related, but they’re not the same. Not that anyone in particular is saying they are, just that I think Blake’s point isn’t really bs, even if it does nothing to “fix the problem.”
because that’s a valid concern, i think. do we not put the work that williams and davis and schutt and etc. do in the same category?
I’m really surprised by your statement, Kate.
i didnt say diversity in the arts doesnt matter. i said the arts is open to diversity more than in other realms.
i apologize for like, veering slightly out of the controlled subject we’re discussing here. i was trying to provide a little Context to examine the relative seriousness of this discussion, how big of a problem is this in the grand scheme. that’s off limits though, okay. good to know.
ugh
its fun to watch pointless things sometimes, like sport
I know a little about disability studies. One of the guiding theories is that, historically, “disability” has always been THE “Othering” Other.
In other words, if I can simplify this a bit in general language: the oppression of a group based on race, gender, or sexual orientation has almost always coincided with “disabling” that group.
So, for instance, you get the conflation of homosexuality with mental illness, or stereotypes of physical and mental “weakness” placed on women, or racialized notions of “intelligence.”
I think this is one reason why there is often hostility toward disability from other marginalized groups.
Oh stop being a drama queen. I’m not saying the discussion cannot veer. I’m just saying I think it’s okay to talk about diversity in the arts even if it isn’t on the same scale as say pay discrepancy or the global position of women. Gah.
Woo, thank you for this! I love reading about fat. Could you provide more book/article recommendations? In fact, email me if you like: r-y-a-n-p-a-r-d at google’s mail service.
This sounds kind of interesting. Are there any certain books you saw this idea developed in?
darby (i’m totally fucking up this reply feature) – yes, i am really talking about novels, that’s what i write and know. i wouldn’t put davis and williams in the same category, no. contemporary system novels are some of the only experimental novels supported by big ny publishers, all written by men. have women written large tomes? yes. miss macintosh my darling, la medusa, the making of americans. an argument could be made that publishers are all about the money and they support these works because they have an already built-in readership, but i’m not sure that if a woman had written pynchon’s v and sent it in over the transom or a woman had written infinite jest it would be published. then. and certainly not now. you could make the argument that infinite jest or v wouldn’t be published now, anyway. that is I think a very valid point. the idea of a large genius tome is viewed usually as a man’s creation, however. in my very limited perspective. even if we take out the question of length, I think it’s difficult in general to have “experimental” (I hate this term, for lack of a better) novels published by big publishers, but more risks have been taken with male writers at least historically. And women novelists in that world are often especially now expected to write “women’s fiction.” Would Mrs. Dalloway be seen as “women’s fiction” now? I don’t know. As I write this I get bored with myself and this issue. I think the answer is to write, that’s why I was responding to Janey Smith’s comment positively, even though yes some of the divisive aspects not so much. I don’t sit and boo-hoo about this. But I have had a lot of trouble getting this one novel published – but so have many worthy writers on HTML Giant, so to make it all about gender, I’m sure, can chafe. It’s not all about gender, of course (although big publishers, again, do segregate novels often by gender). It could be that my novel isn’t good enough. I think that’s a total possibility. I should also add that the novel I am referring to, the one which I did send around, is very “feminine,” in that it is set in a department store in London and is kind of an existentialist novel dealing with a shopgirl and is a larger text. So it’s possibly why I have been pigeonholed or haven’t had success.
stop being snarky then. ‘Come on. Context.’
Statistics are important to include in the discussion because it directly rebuffs claims like “X publishes lots of women” or “Women are winning most of the awards.” The statistics show that in many cases that’s simply not true, despite one’s perception. Like women are running the workplace, when actually they make .70 on every $1 a man makes. Sure, it’s not as dire as other situations for women in the world, but judging on how pissed some people get when women bring up this topic, I think there’s plenty of room for women to feel a bit pissed too. If there’s nothing wrong with publications to be mostly or completely men, why is it wrong to point that FACT out? Why is it wrong to point out that such publications are niche and perhaps lack appeal to a large segment of readers?
Sometimes the statistics really highlight how skewed a perception might be. We also have to be careful about assuming our own experiences and perceptions are somehow the norm. Our personal statistics may be very different from many others. Especially if you’re one of the few exceptions in publications that drastically skew in a certain direction. If you have the perception that you’re frequently invited to send work because you are X, perhaps that is true, and if that is true, why is it that you’re one of the few writers who are X that these editors ever think to solicit? Do they know the work of other X writers? Are you one of the few good X writers out there? Is it ignorance of the work being written by Xs or is it the belief that there just aren’t many good X writers? There was a long time when one might have had the perception that the only “good” Latina actresses were Jennifer Lopez or Salma Hayek, because they were the only ones who seemed to be getting any substantial roles.
Yeah, I get the impression Blake is familiar with and interested in the works of many women writers based on the books he writes about on HTMLGIANT. I do not get that impression from some of the other editors participating in the discussion a couple weeks ago, the ones who were like, um, all I can think of is Ayn Rand and Getrude Stein. Since Blake is both well read and intelligent, he should be able to recognize these other editors’ limitations. He doesn’t say, “no dude, you have to read these 20 writers,” no, it’s a flippant “genitalia counting” dismissal and anyone who doesn’t find that HILARIOUS has no sense of humor. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor, I failed to see the funny.
I love how Blake’s point was swiftly neglected. To argue against reductionism and then insist upon prioritizing gender over the myriad other outside influences that condition experience is itself reductionistic, even if you deny that’s what you’re doing. Any discussion that starts with “3 of 18” prioritizes gender in a mind-numbingly flat way. (And I am NOT saying that we shouldn’t perhaps prioritize gender over certain other Othering experiences; I’m simply saying that that discussion is not what’s taking place here.) How many of those 18 first contributors to WAC are obese? How many are black? How many have been hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder? For how many is English a second or third language? How many earn less than 20,000 a year? How many have bad teeth and cannot afford braces? How many can’t pay their rent? How many donate to charity? How many have extensive facial scarring, or how many stutter?
—. . .You know what? At a certain level, the individual editor cannot give a damn. She must carefully develop her own powers of aesthetic evaluation and then ASSERT them, come what may. If you find Gene’s assertion of his own aesthetic capabilities “problematic” (ugh), then READ THE MAGAZINE PROVIDE AN EFFING CRITIQUE; CHALLENGE HIM TO DEVELOP FURTHER AS A THOUGHTFUL READER OF ART. Do not hide behind “3 of 18,” especially when the sample size is so insignificantly small. (Do not mistake me for denying the fact that women’s work is often undervalued: it is, and it’s shitty. Our society progresses by only the tiniest of intervals, and the Othering experience that a given female artist endured 100 years ago is not that different from the same prejudice her own work endures in the present. But just as shoddy art inevitably succumbs to historical oblivion despite even the fiercest contemporary cheerleading (Hello, Jon Franzen!), truly great art can and will withstand the worst of our society’s ill treatment and hate. Work always to make the lives of women less hellish, of course, but do not pity the art. If the art is strong enough, it will take care of itself.)
I don’t think Blake asserted the privileged position; he didn’t say gender does not influence him. He questioned why it ought to be only one of a few criteria involved in the evaluative process. IMO, that’s fair game, because while there are many realms wherein the nuanced discussion of outside social conditioning can be fascinating, when we read for literary pleasure this is flat-out not what we read for. To a certain extent we must know them since they constitute the very rules of the game, but to the solitary reader they are very nearly interchangeable: we would still read and love Hamlet even if the outside force he was contending with were not his father’s commandment to kill his uncle. If Hamlet were a modern-day obese adolescent who everyday contended with whether or not to stand up to his ruthless blockhead bullies at noon recess, we would love him just as much so long as his interior force of character remained the same. We read in search of the human anima, not for what determines it.
On the pussipo list I brought up the issue of exclusion of poets with obvious disabilities. Roxanne, you seem particularly interested in diversity. Is disability on your radar when you publish? I find that even all-women’s conferences/athologies don’t include poets with disabilities.
Sorry if this is old hat to some.
Anon/Roxane, I was asking myself the same question. Do the words, to the reader, bear the vestiges of gender, or of any other characteristic of the author. Because I become genuinely confused by this conversation somewhere between body and politics: do we want to see some notion of the feminine, of womanhood, reflected to a greater/more prismatic degree in what we read? Or do we want to see more women published, to even the scales in a census kind of way? Can men write the feminine? Can women write the masculine? Do we want them/us to try?
And of course it seems that, in terms of numbers, we’re mostly talking here about lit mags/”literature”/experimental writing. Because there are a lot of women, writing about bodies, being published by mainstream presses. (Self-help? Eating disorder memoirs? Sexual escapades? Romance novels?) Do we not like these books? We do not like these books for this discussion.
Roxane, for me anyway, “muscular prose” conjures litheness, agility–not masculinity, at least not exclusively, at all. But again, it’s a good question–what *is* masculine prose? Content, or form?
Ben: And what if u judged blind?
Oops, I meant to ask for an explanation of the quoted statement.
i wasn’t joking.
“there are whole presses devoted entirely to publishing females
none devoted entirely to publishing men”
Maybe not a press, but there is a journal.
http://www.bullmensfiction.com/
It’s possible that he meant compact prose. Condensation of meaning. Etc.
Though likely he meant “not too many words. Do not qualify. Do not challenge me.” Yawn.
Hey, this is tangent to the discussion-proper going on here, but I can’t help sticking up for the amazing and innovative people at Harper Perennial–or maybe just trying to shed some light on what actually goes on at a commercial publishing house. Let’s see if I can do this without revealing any trade secrets!
It’s not that HP doesn’t have a marketing strategy–of course they do; why wouldn’t they? they’re a company selling a product–but if you only look at the evidence you want to see, you’re not going to learn anything other than what you already know.
Barb Johnson’s “More of this World or Maybe Another”- a debut short fiction collection that was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick.
Lydia Peelle’s “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”- a debut short fiction collection.
“Neon Angel”- a memoir by former Runaway Cherie Currie, co-authored by Harper Perennial author and non-American person (and notable ex-junkie) Tony O’Neill. This came out from It Books, which is a separate imprint, but is run by largely the same staff as those who run HP.
GIRLS TO THE FRONT: THE TRUE STORY OF THE RIOT GRRL REVOLUTION, a nonfiction book by Sara Marcus (and hey, why not throw out there that her editor is Alison Lorentzen) forthcoming this fall.
FOUR BOOKS by the great gay and/or indie writer Dennis Cooper, including several partial and full re-issues and a brand-new novel. Dennis, one of our most challenging and important living American writers, is on a major press for the first time in his career.
And hey, why not, as long as we’re brushing up on too close for comfort, why not include Kevin Sampsell and myself on the diversity list? Both of our books explore contemporary sexuality in ways that are fluid, ambivalent, and non-normative. Neither Kevin nor I are “queer writers”–and I don’t think either of us is gunning for that status–but neither are our visions of maleness or heterosexuality easily plottable on Katie Roiphe’s Mailer-Updike-Roth graph.
This isn’t to say that they aren’t selling plenty of books by men–including yours truly, whose negative capability notwithstanding tends to date women (or wish they’d still date him, as the case may be)–but if you think that “men” passes for a marketing strategy, do yourself a favor and don’t start a press of your own. If you were to go through HP’s whole catalog, starting from what they’re pushing this season, and moving through time from this Point Zero for say 18 months in both directions, you would actually see the patterns that *do* exist– (1) they like younger writers, (2) they like debuts, (3) they aren’t scared of short story collections, (4) they are keenly interested in writers that seem to have “come up” through the indie- and small-press world but seem like their work is accessible to a mainstream audience, (5) they like punk rock, (6) they like things that are on the “provocative” side, (7) they like writers who seem pro-active about promoting their work (see #4), (8) none of this stops them from publishing mid-career writers, such as Binnie Kirshenbaum to name just one, who don’t fit into most or any of the previous categories but happen to be really great, and (9) they’ll try damn near anything once–twice if it works out the first time (see “Six Word Memoir,” “Fiction Inspired by The Smiths,” and the forthcoming “The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide,” first announced on this website, co-edited by a woman named Eva Talmadge and a man named Yours Truly).
These things are always sure I’m female no matter what I paste in. Like, really, really sure.
i would like a fat blake photo.
Also, Ben, I see my blind judge question was exhaustively examined earlier (naturally)
so, forget it. Better question.
why mow?
There are computer programs that pretty accurately guess gender by a writing sample. Like here: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php and http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html
There have been a lot of studies on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/2vwc9uc
I have been told that I have an overtly feminine writing style and I believe that to be true.
Disability is actually on my radar but I have to admit it is newly on my radar because a good friend of mine was recently diagnosed with a disorder that completely changed her physical abilities. She’s now pursuing disability studies and I’ve started learning more about it by way of my friendship with her. I am by no means a paragon of inclusion as an editor. It’s truly something I am working on and trying to be better about.
sport as pointless is a funny internet comment.
i’m chewing on this gender thing.
I have so many stacks of books on my desk i will read this summer. I never thought about gender. But I’m the reader. You are discussing the other end. The creation of…
I know I am in love with lydia davis
why are you surprised?
Sport as pointless also kind of captures the spirit of this discussion, I think.
Sport is not pointless.
Writing is sport.
Ok, that comment was triggered by your comment in this interview: “But what about the nipples? Can we have no sense of humor?”
I really do think I have a sense of humor, but I get the strong that sense that these comments are trying to derail the conversation into inanity–which is more off-putting.
One of the disturbing trends I’ve noticed on this site, and other sites that seem to champion more experimental forms of writing, is a kind of ahistoricism, or an idea that only “aesthetics” matter. This is a rather privileged position to hold; it must be easy to live in a world where you don’t have to “think” about pesky subjects like gender, race, class, or disability–to be above all of these matters and entirely focused on how good your sentences sound on the page.
I’m drawn to “edgy,” odd, goofy, comic, and experimental work myself. Language means a lot to me. I don’t sit down to write fiction that has a political or social point to prove. However, doesn’t the writer still need to be somewhat engaged with political and social ideas in order for any of those ideas to emanate naturally through language and craft? Honestly, some of the arguments I’ve read here lately are incredibly dated, arguments that toss around words like “realism” and “experimental” without considering their historical contexts.
For instance, I’ve read a lot of patronizing and condescending rhetoric on this site about “realism,” or, my favorite, “domestic realism,” comments that seem to imply that these aesthetics–aesthetics that have historically been used to address social and political matters, esp. for women writers–are somehow beneath more experimental writing (nevermind the fact that many of the original. postmodern writers were middle class white dudes from the northeast who wanted to forget about history, or the lack of class, regional, and ethnic diversity in much of the early “postmodern” canon). There seems to be an idea here, at times, that having a subversive aesthetic is enough.
Wow, the Gender Genie is pretty cool. However, I ran this comment and your comment below through the system and it is pretty sure you’re a male.
The second one kept telling me I was weak male. Feels great to be told that by a robot.
And PS- the (10)th thing which I forgot to include- Loyalty. One thing you’ll notice about HP authors is that they tend to do several books with the imprint. Unlike most contemporary publishers, who buy a book at a time, and often drop authors if book1 doesn’t work out exactly according to plan, HP very often attempts to buy several books at once, then will release those books over the course of several successive seasons and/or years. This mode of editor-writer collaboration is very old-school, and most welcome. It provides stability, certainty, and a sense of institutional coherence that is very useful to both the writer and the author.
Okay. Love letter to HP now officially over. And of course none of this should be construed as me speaking “for” them. These reflections are offered from my position as a highly interested party, my experience as a participant observer, etc.
It’s too small of a sample! :)
Why do you hold that position?
If I am riding the bus, I am certainly more concerned with what was made than who made it. I mean, yes, if the bus was constructed by wageless laborers who were whipped ceaselessly and fed only kitty kibble, sure, I am concerned about that. But as I am riding the bus I am primarily concerned with what was made. —Will it keep me safe? Will it get me to where I am going?
Would you ride (and pay the fee for riding) a slow and unsafe bus that was made under generous, ethical, relaxing, and well-paid conditions?
Ideally of course we want and need both—but which do you sacrifice, should you need to choose between them? Do I bemoan the conditions it was made in and begrudgingly ride the well-made bus, or do I cheerfully ride the bus that may kill me?
I’m aware, of course, that what I’m presenting is 99% of the time a false dichotomy. Rarely if ever would similar circumstances arise for an editor choosing between artwork. But I think there is some value to it, in how how it helps us realize what we value more than something else.
I ran the the whole of roxane’s blog through it. It says she is 55% male, and probably European.
Sure, here are four books that I’ve read in the last year or so:
“Diability Theory,” Tobin Siebers
“Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture,” James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
“Gendering Disability,” Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison
“Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability,” Robert McRuer
I want to second that Blake writes about houses
Awesome. Must be all the foul language.
I dunno, it was in response to someone who mentioned the nipples.
I think the nipple thing is hard to figure out. I didn’t see the post, but I don’t think “Hah, look, prominent nipples!” is necessarily so malevolent. Dumb, yeah, but evil (maybe) only if part of a larger trend of hatred.
Though of course maybe the post was bout more than an arbitrary professor’s nipples. If it carried undertones of “Look at this edumacated woman with her pokey nipples, she should be put in her place,” then I get the offense.
I put some posts from my blog and it pegs me as a dude, but it recognizes my poems as written by a woman. My blog has a mustache, awesome.
Huh, it said I was 62% male. The text I used as source, I assumed it was in a more “feminine” style.
i definitely don’t think the nipples think was the least bit evil.
thing. ugh.
It figured out that the opening pages of Norman Rush’s Mating are written by a man, even though the first-person protagonist is female. Of course, this means that Rush failed in his attempt, unless of course he was trying to create the sort of character that would stump the likes of the Gender Genie by flying gleefully in the face of stereotype, using words like “many” and “are” and “said” and “to” which are, apparently, male fingerprints left all over the crime scene of the text.
As much as I can’t believe that this maniacally dichotomizing program is actually successful with as great frequency as they say it is, I am curious to learn more. After all, it was a computer program that figured out who the Unabomber was, no, as well as pegging Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors. That was over ten years ago, and still blows my mind.
this probably all starts drifting toward the discussion below of what is masculin and what is feminin literature. the system novels seem masculin. are there long novels that aren’t system, and is there a market for it? we get close to making this an even tighter numbers game now, where its not just the number of women writing, but the number of words a writer outputs. Do women like pynchon? did any women read and enjoy gravity’s rainbow? i don’t compare what williams is doing to this, but can we compare the simple fact that williams is niching her own? is Pynchon better than Williams? it seems that the more experimental writing is, the more it gets pigeonholed into tiny vagina feminin and gigantic phalus masculin, but i dont know if its necessarily unbalanced. there aren’t any men in mainstream doing what williams does to that level of sucess, and why is that success not comparable?
For the record, I quite like Gene’s magazine and Kate and I, in particular, do voice throughout the conversation that WAC is a symptom, not even remotely the problem.
Wasn’t White Teeth kind of paraded as a updated variation on the “system novel”? (Or no? I’m not very clear what is meant by system novel.)
i too appear to be a weak and/or european male
Yeah, in my little rant there I guess I was mainly thinking of the prior discussion wherein several posters indicted the mag on the basis of the contributor’s list alone.
And for what it’s worth, I haven’t read it and don’t intend to. Gene’s response to the criticism was so whacky (making fun of someone’s forehead??) that I’m not interested in his creation.
Well i find it disturbing that a good sentence is somehow apolitical. George Orwell could get exponential on your ass with a good sentence. or:
“They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time.”
etc.
I don’t see a big “subversive aesthetic” (whatever that means) as argued strongly as “enough” here.
Then again I don’t read every comment here or even wear black jeans with an iPhone chrome clip.
What books are you referencing? What authors of books?
All these sentence writers seem to also know structure, theme, issues that touch some sliver of the human mind.
Experimental writers, whatever experimental means (can you do it 1000 times and still be experimental?), are experimenting politically.
The abstract form is saying no to the landscape, etc.
ive never heard system novel either but i like that. i like systems. i’m thinking of it as novels that use the sonata principle, from wikipeedia… ‘the shift away from the idea that each movement should express one dominant emotion (see Affekt), to a notion of accommodating contrasting themes and sections in an integrated whole.’
Kristen, for me, I do not need to see more notions of the feminine in writing (though I am interested in thinking about writing as gendered). I often think it would be so limiting to creativity to try and regulate subject matter, to try and adhere to strictures of the masculine and feminine in the content itself. While statistics are only so useful, I am very interested in increased representation in terms of the author. I have a certain, faith, I guess, in the creative spectrum to know that there will always be, as Blake calls for (and rightly so) a diversity of the word.
Thank you for sharing your understanding of muscular prose. It is a phrase I see used often and I always wonder do they mean masculine or just… muscular.
darby – not a big fan of the term “tiny vagina feminin,” mostly because that seems really about the sex parts, and when I think of feminine writing as an aesthetic, I’m not excluding male writers, I think I say that somewhere in this forum-thing later on. but you are talking about market, and a lot of this is market. women novelists are often pigeonholed in the market. why aren’t longer experimental novels by women published more by big publishers? of course there are exceptions. and even though i far prefer diane williams, you cannot nearly measure the success of pynchon with williams, if you are talking about the market, etc. i mean there’s been academic conferences devoted to pynchon. he was a simpsons character. it’s not about a numbers game for me.
That all makes sense. Knee jerk reactions all around.
Your blog is in drag!
demi-puppet – yes zadie smith would certainly be a writer who is seen part of that group with martin amis, david foster wallace, etc. popular writers who are more experimental.
i think of system novel as a big beast of a thing.
Roxann,
I am so happy. Thank you. Do you (or others?) find it hypocritical that women who are marginalized exclude other groups? I went to the Lifting Belly conference where a poet was actually hostile about including disability. I’ve also been to women’s events that are non-wheelchair assessible. This really gets to me because women with disabilities are so much more profoundly excluded that ‘able’ women.
Jen
Maybe I should start describing the writing I like in physiological terms. “I like fat writing—I love to fondle the love handles.” “I like lanky writing.” “I like writing with brown eyes.”
Jennifer, I do find it hypocritical. I think that marginalized people (again, I implicate myself) are often the worst at creating true coalitions with other groups and instead engage in oppression olympics. I have it worse! No I have it worse! It’s a really difficult black hole to pull free from because it’s easy to be myopic about the ways in which you might be marginalized. This sort of inability to create coalition and act inclusively is a real problem.
i love ‘tiny vagina feminin.’ its my new favorite.
im getting silly with this discussion. when does it end? why do we have to keep having it over and over at htmlgiant. HTMLGIANT: The Internet Gender-Issues Magazine Political Blog of the Future.
guess i can just quit out. think i will. so long.
A deadline is named because of its inflexibility. As in ‘dead’. Think ‘hardline’, only harder. Like rigor mortis. Or something like that.
But ‘system’—does this suggest a kind of epic scope? What makes a system novel “system,” and not just long?
Also, I think the word ‘problematize’ is maybe just a bad idea.
It is, particularly in that it’s not a real word but I’m an academic and by law, I have to use it frequently and inappropriately.
Hear, hear, Amy. I believe that what you say about representation and ratio cuts to the crux of this argument (which I see as its inherent and incredible weakness.) When we boil things down to their numbers, we miss the point.
That’s not – emphatically not – to dismiss gender bias in any way, shape, or form. Merely to say that if WAC issue 2 was a rip-snorter of a read and contained more women writers than men, it would be fine with me. If it was a partially good read because they had to get the ratio right, I am less inclined to be interested or even curious. Same goes for political representation and the like. I’m not confronted by female leadership, authority, or of dominance (in terms of higher ratio) in the political sphere by women or any other sphere for that matter. I believe in meritocracy and in the best person for the job. And why not the same in the less relevant world of poetry publishing?
yes epic not lyric. virgin suicides is lyric. middlesex is epic. but regardless of whether system or not, i will still maintain that experimental novels by women are less published in the big publishing world.
Just as a point of fact, Gertrude Stein was published by Knopf from the early 30s.
This was a really great discussion. I’m very glad it was done as a dialogue between you all as it’s allowed for a lot of range and also the sense of camaraderie has come through which I think can be overwhelmed sometimes and it’s important. there are a few things that this post got me thinking over: forgive the length.
I want to start with Blake’s point on inclusion: “This kind of shouting for emphasis on elements outside the work has always gotten under my skin. I want language, ideas, words, image, and that, for me, comes from all over, and the body is the last most important influence. This isn’t fashion or sports, where it’s all body and prowess of flex. It’s mind, light, spirit, blood.” In the first place, I actually agree with the emphasis on the last four things: they fascinate me too. I think we are very ripe right now for a return of Ideas in the capital sense, or, in other words, things which reach beyond the question of how we know them to what they are in a way that pertains to reality more largely, beyond the uncertainty principle of the mind. I think we are ready to deal with reality, or, better, time has run short in which we can put these questions off any longer.
But – as has been pointed out by Amy, where she asks “who says one cannot be concerned with gender disparities, and other political matters, as well as being interested in other writerly-issues such as aesthetics?” – the grounds for Blake’s position rely on some notion that the body is not also an idea, that the body ends at the body. I think I’ve argued before that the body goes wherever language goes because language is itself a body, never more so than when it’s turned into a body of writing. When I say that, I do not mean that wherever a male writes, the fundamental truth of that text is its maleness. Rather, what I mean to say is that the embodiment of language is what we call representation. Every book is bound by an outside that it cannot simply put away. They follow it through. Its conditions – as Benjamin argued in his own way, in his work on aura in the age of mechanical reproduction – circle it, and they, almost always, as outsides do, poke their head through, somewhere within it, even if they don’t quite break the surface. That is to say, a book is still a book. It is not everything. It is still only one door to the all that it wishes to maintain lies within it, for the time of its duration. To me, the all is no less all for this necessity of an entrance, but nor is the entrance less the way in simply because infinity lies beyond the door.
To put it in concrete terms: X is a male writer. Okay. That tells us very little of anything about what he writes or how or why. And even less of the what, how and why matter if we are examining the political motives: X might be a male, say, but a staunch feminist. However, say he were, indeed, a feminist (in fact, he’s more likely to be today than not, in our age of ‘equality). Notice that with enough male feminists, there isn’t any need – or room – for female feminists anymore. In many ways, that sums up our hypocritical reactions toward the dis- or under-enfranchised today. By becoming ‘conscious’, and allowing a degree of representation (i.e. tokenism), we are in a better position than ever to allow the organisation of disparity to continue, even in the forward thinking realm of experimentalist representation. As Nina Power writes, there is a genealogical dimension to this appropriation freeze-out: in aesthetic history, “the ‘genius’ typically possesses feminine characteristics – imagination, intuition, emotion, madness – but is not of course an actual woman: the great artist is a feminine male, but not a feminine female or a masculine female. Women can be mad, but not aesthetically inspired, or they can be sane, and provide comfort for the true creators, who are a little bit womanish, but not too much.” This is why I have an issue with Blake, perhaps more than any other thing, when he says: “So, then, if your most central focus (or one of your foci) is that, great, that is yours. There are no laws. For me, it’s spheres, and politics is shit compared to opening other doors.” This idea that the politics of representation is a thing that’s free to be yours and not mine is such an issue because it turns the fact of a public reality into a simple matter of private choice. It’s interesting Blake speaks of spheres, here, since separate spheres has always been a way of operating the gender divide: especially now, when women are in public and work, but are chronically paid less for the same work, promoted far less, must still provide primary care to families as well as provide full-time labour. That is to say, there are laws, today more than ever. And it takes a certain – and, yes, privileged – relation to the law to have the conviction that there are no laws, equal for everyone, in quite this way.
Anyone who writes today – who has the ‘time’ to write – probably is (relatively speaking) privileged. (Though this, too, raises a whole other battery of questions about writers who are completely beyond this conversation: the people who do write without ‘time’ to write and, may I say, there are enough examples of outsider art and belatedly recovered writings or authors who die or stop writing because of their particular bodies (Tim Dlugos comes to mind) to more than convince me that conditions have already narrowed the field of this conversation down: writers are not inherently privileged, the treatment of them as ‘writers’ is inherently privileged; it’s just that even a pursuit as financially unrewarding as writing today, in the West, is that much a commodity it seems as if all writing everywhere must be an act of privilege). But that argument about the relative privilege of all writers as an indication in itself that discrimination and exploitation is an elective issue is a cop out. It’s a sort of relativism and a false syllogism: all writers are privileged, minority writers are writers, hence minority writers are privileged.
This leads me to another point: on apolitical art. If I’m arguing that art has a politics, what I’m not saying is that art may not be apolitical. I think this conversation has helped me understand something I couldn’t quite grasp before: that maybe it’s the concern over whether art can ever be about anything ‘other’ than politics that fuels Blake’s stance in this debate. Apolitical art is actually one of my favourite kinds of art. But there are some fundamental misunderstandings about what apolitical means. To be apolitical is actually not something so simple as not caring or knowing about politics: that’s actual pure politics. Rather, apoliticism is about a knowing decision to disengage.
Here’s a good example: in Saramago’s Seeing, elections are held. But nobody in the population votes. Everyone sends back their ballot blank. This sudden and total withdrawal of the people from the social institutes mass crisis in its management. The social symbols of power matter in a very material way, we learn, and without the empty crown of the people to rule in the name of the government cannot govern and reveals itself as the naked dictatorship it was all along. But since the people wont even respond to that, it just falls apart. Yet notice that in order for this withdrawal to work, for the people to send their ballots back blank, they all have to be registered as voters. They have to be politically certified. If they weren’t registered, their apoliticism would merely maintain the status quo: for the drastic drop in representation would not prevent a minor proportion of the population ‘legitimately’ returning a government to power in a system of ‘free’ choice on whether to vote or not. This is basically the state of the voluntary vote in the United States or all other Western countries without mandatory voting laws (which, you’ll see, have all swung to the Right far more sharply in the last thirty years than countries which make the population vote). In the last election, the voter turnout in the US was about 62% of the voting age population (at least, of the voters counted by census statistics: leaving out the large numbers – like illegal immigrants – or certain groups – like certain sex workers – unrepresented). Here, you have a thirty-eight percent abstention in the eligible voting population – we’re talking tens of millions of people – and yet it is as if that gaping void means nothing because their voice is not mandated to count from the outset. They are not required to vote – hence, if they don’t, rather than a crisis, it’s a non-event, or, even worse, an “issue”, something for pundits to wring their hands over then go for lunch.
This has been a long tangent but here’s its point. Apolitical art is actually oriented in a political context from which it withdraws. It sets up its architecture so that its withdrawal is oriented to its context. This is not to say that apolitical art has a political agenda – no more than the population in Saramago’s book has any clear instructions on what it ‘wants’ – but it isn’t just absenting itself without disruption to the system conditions that bind it. Experimentalism demands exactly such disruptions and this is exactly why it’s not good enough for issues of discrimination to be some people’s thing and not others. It needn’t be the manifest theme of one’s art – real conditions of impoverishment, exploitation, division of labour may not feature in the work at all: take, for instance, Oulipo. But, like Oulipo, what makes the work so genuinely exploratory and new is that its look elsewhere is predicated on its very deep consciousness of the system from which it is withdrawing. To turn this into a matter of ‘free choice’ is, basically, to take on the high politics of affirming your ‘choice’ not to have a position simply because a political position that simply doesn’t ‘feel’ like politics – which is, no offense, how political positions of privilege always feel. Apolitical art evacuates positionality: it doesn’t deny, however, that position matters.
So to Blake’s question on the politics of representation: “It matters to you, but does that mean it has to for others?”, the answer is yes, it does. Or, to put it another way, if it doesn’t matter to others, I don’t want to be told by those selfsame others to whom it does not matter that they are simultaneously uninterested in the politics that inform things while also simultaneously masters of impartiality and fair-mindedness. And – not targeting Blake here, but speaking more broadly – isn’t that essentially how the hypocrisy of this idea is played out? That the people for whom such issues don’t matter are also simultaneously the first to insist that they are – essentially; they’re always humble and full of human fraility, they could do better, but essentially -they are always already on top of the game, are already a broad church when it comes to this? Or, alternatively, though completely contradictorily, aren’t doing any real harm by that stuff not mattering to them? The argument for ‘caring only about the work’ effortlessly carries ‘the work’ to already exist its fullest most inclusive and emancipatory sense. Yet the need to put off any ethical consequences – to say the work is already complete, rather than own up to one’s partiality {“I can’t be bothered to read what gay writers have to say”), to have the cake and say it doesn’t exist too – is precisely how independence of mind is ideologized as essentially a natural right, when it is actually formed out a conditional monumentalisation of the mind, of a camel being forced through the eye of a needle and the meat being declared ‘the stuff of us all’. This is not to argue that people do not exercise autonomy in their imagination but rather that it isn’t this sort of automatic thing or that the form of that autonomy is equal to everyone. The imagination is not a realm where history goes away: like religion, the only way to share the imaginative realm is to forge real collective ties in reality. (Hence, by the way, the importance of rituals.) Again, though, such real connectivities does not mean that the imagination is only those in the last resort but nor does it mean the imaginative worlds of Christianity and Confucianism bear no real differences at all because they’re all religions. In actual fact, it is precisely the difference the real allows that enables imagination to be infinite. And it takes imagination, too, to think about what one must do to form and unbind ties in reality. This is exactly the imagination, or aesthetics, that I believe Amy means when she asks: “Aren’t we large-thinking humans, capable of all sorts of considerations? Why must one consideration obliterate any others for you?” None of this is incompatible in the slightest with open consideration of the politics of representation nor does it reduce it to the false freedom of private choice or extraneousness.
One final point. At one stage, Blake says:
“What if we started counting issues of how many non-white writers were in a magazine? How many homosexuals? How many raised in the South? How many who have mothers with cancer? These are perspective influencers that hold just as thick a prowess over a person’s mind as having a certain organ does. How can we catalyze all of these elements into a truly “equal” ground. We can’t. And even if we could, should every one? Is it every person’s responsibility to place the same emphasis on social determinism? If you are into that, go for it. But to me, again, I care about the work. And I don’t think having a penis means I am male gendered. In most of my relationships, I have as many female characteristics as I do male, if not more toward the former.”
I’ve addressed my problem with the “if you are into that, go for it” part of this paragraph above and how it sets up a bogus distinction between ‘sidebar’ issues and “the work”. In truth, concern with “the work” demands concern with the sidebar unless you take “the work” to mean whatever floats toward you by virtue of the atmosphere around you. Actually, the happening upon writers is a vital part of the discovery of good writing – so atmosphere absolutely does matter – but once more this raises the question of the atmosphere that allows what work to come to you and also the assumption that the work is pre-understood as being comprehensive by nature, without any ‘artificial’ interventions that would “quota” (or, I would insist, simply retool) its scope. But there’s another thing here and that’s the idea that factoring in difference leads to some ludicrous outcome where all the dizzying axes of psychology, body, history and matter must be accommodated and that this is impossible, so this conversation is pointless. Yet, what this rush to finish implies is that all differences are basically the same and, thus, should be treated so. However, the whole point of difference is that it is marked (or erased) differently and so demands different methods of response in terms of its peculiar disenfranchisement or underenfranchisement. While being gay, fat, or coming from the South are definitely “perspective influencers that hold just as thick a prowess over a person’s mind as having a certain organ does”, and while it would evidently be violations of privacy and taste to email all the potential contributors to your journal, asking them are they gay, or fat, or Southern, tell me your every thing about your life ever, none of this means you would stop looking for stories that may, in some way, deal with fat innovatively, or which would think the South in some specific way. For that matter, if you think you’ve really read the sex parts of a lesbian or gay story by thinking of it as “just sex”, you haven’t at all. In a way, the ludicrous conclusion of an impossible representation – what I’d call a difference-engine – is exactly what literature is. But the problem is that the difference-engine, in its material facet, of publication, text, seems to be willing to arrange the center of representation along certain axes predominantly. It is here – at the point where we stare straight down the barrel of the difference indifference of the difference-engine – that we come up against its elitism, its exclusion, often its exploitation. This is why it matters to actively seek out writers in terms of gender or race or sexuality or able-bodiedness. These are not differences among differences but differences that the difference-engine itself powers itself on suppressing and barring from altering the machine itself.
Now, in some instances, like gender, it may seem ‘easier’ to read for difference – theoretically, you don’t need to email someone called ‘Barbara’ and ask if they’re a woman (of which more in a moment). But that ‘ease’ in the case of gender only goes how fucking extraordinary it is that there’s this very palpable recalcitrance to even go that far – let alone the differences that really require work to represent, like sexuality. That you take different tactics for different differences is exactly right. As I’ve said before, if it feels ‘artificial’ to include women writers in some degree because they are women (though it’s a sexist assumption, not a feminist assumption, that including a woman as a woman thereby means you have to lower the bar of talent; what it does mean is you might have to re-orient your deadlines, make specific calls for women contributors, try to extend your networks to encompass enclaves where you can appeal for submissions to a wider number of women writers etc.), if this feels ‘artificial’, it’s only because the status quo is so cloyingly oriented even today toward old Mr. Straight-White. Lily Hoang is right: it’s not so much an issue for a woman to be published now but for women, in the general sense of the category, it’s become even harder precisely because it’s not so much of an issue for a woman to be published. And, on this, to go back to ‘Barbara’, for a moment. The question of whether you know Barbara is a woman raises an important question, one of the most important: what about transgendered authors? The ones who are really at odds and in the know about gender? I don’t mean to be offensive – and I would love to be proven wrong – but can anyone here name me even one transgendered writer or artist (without looking up online)? Has anyone here ever published or corresponded with a transgendered writer? Now, I can tell you it is absolutely not because transgendered persons do not want to write. Or aren’t inherently talented enough, whatever the fuck that would mean. Or aren’t writing or producing art. It’s because there is absolutely no scanning or encouragement or institutional welcoming, just a white noise of disinterest and, often, a buzz of hostility when the topic is brought up and it upsets the sense we’re as universal as we’d like to think we are. To me, the fact that we can tell gender in some ways – and the fact that can help us enfranchise in some ways – does not mean we have solved the problem of gender. Solving the problem of gender is not what this is about. It’s about the difference-engine becoming really different so that the engine itself does not look the same. I think this is a task that falls heaviest on experimentalist artists (and intakers of experimental art) more than any other group, for the obsessive interest in – and, yes, even love of – art here is not present in almost any other place in society and so it is here that the difference matters. And that’s what troubles me most about all of this, I guess: if we can’t make this consciousness count here, then where?
Wait a minute: you never see the conflation of “boring, unoriginal writing that is ‘realistic’ with “realism” on this site? Seriously? I don’t read all of the posts here either, and I don’t have a bibliography for you, but I’ve read enough comments over the last year or so to notice the “trend.”
There’s a difference between work that is boringly “realistic” and the aesthetic of “realism” (I’m assuming that when we discuss aesthetic, we’re not myopic enough to define an entire aesthetic based on work that is nothing but a poor imitation and boringly unoriginal). The best realism is not boring, nor is it ‘realistic.’ Good realism ain’t “real.”
I never said that a good sentence was “apolitical,” either. In my post, I thought I was clear in saying that the best political and social fiction feels natural–the aesthetic and commentary (for lack of a better word) are intertwined, and part of an organic process (and yes, I understand that “social’ and “political” can mean many different things, and that a conscious subversion of style is, in many ways, “political”).
I was responding to a trend I’ve noticed in some of the comments here lately that take the political and social in fiction for granted. As far as I’m concerned, any writer worth his or her salt should have no problem pointing out the political and social issues addressed in his or her work, and their relationship to aesthetic. Even the late Victorian “aesthetic” writers like Wilde who are often portrayed as dandyish hedonists were clearly responding to mid-Victorian ideas of utility and pragmatism in their fiction and poetry.
You write that “experimental writers” are experimenting politically (and I’m sure many of them are). Well, then, these writers should have no problem acknowledging the political nature of their aesthetic, and stating how–specifically–their aesthetic functions politically and socially. If the answer is just, “oh, well, I’m just tired of all of the boring ‘realism’ I read in MFA lit mags,” then they have a long way to go to be convincing. Also, what you’ll notice in many of these discussions is that white, straight, able-bodied writers are the ones who are most flippant. As a disabled writer, it’s impossible for me to take the political and social for granted in these discussions, and reduce most everything to “aesthetic,” because the predominant aesthetic in my culture tells me that my experience is–mostly–only worth writing about gratuitously.
At the end of the day, then, what it comes down to is honesty and the willingness to articulate the political and social in one’s fiction; reducing gender to “penis” and “vagina” doesn’t really advance the discussion, and since this is a discussion, all we can go on are the comments people post.
Really? Or are you being facetious? I plan on someday going to grad school. Assuming you’re serious, what happens if you don’t use it?
would having a small dick count as a disability?
I think it’s unfair to reduce aesthetics to “how things sound on the page.”
And who has argued that -only- aesthetics matter? I know that I only argue for its primacy.
There is literally no distinction between a subversive aesthetic and and an effective (well-wrought) aesthetic. Oftentimes what is labeled as a “subversive aesthetic” is the exact opposite.
If it’s small enough to impede sex.
I’m being partly facetious. It’s a word I’ve gotten in the habit of using to discuss my research, for example, but I can and do recognize that it is a mostly empty word.
If you don’t use it, you lose a finger. They start with the thumb.
i am an academic, too.
what does this mean.
a mobile home is a home that moves.
a trailer home is a home that movies.
what am i saying.
“Like women are running the workplace, when actually they make .70 on every $1 a man makes.”
This stat isn’t really accurate. The last government survey showed single women working the same job with the same experience get .94 cents per dollar a man makes. So a discrepancy, but small.
The .70 cent thing has to do with men working higher paying working-class jobs, specifically construction, carpentry and so on and women tending to work part-time over full-time or take significant time off of their careers to raise children.
I sense that the New Critics were the worst thing to ever happen to aesthetic criticism. The way that aesthetic criticism (or even a generally aesthetic perspective) is instantly conflated with an aversion to extra-textual criticism is nauseating.
Anyone want to weigh in on fat studies?
http://www.nyupress.org/books/The_Fat_Studies_Reader-products_id-11104.html
How are we to determine the weight of submitters to magazines?
There is a long history of privileged writers in this country coding “aesthetics” as a means to avoid history and social issues. New Criticism was partly based on this idea of “aesthetic primacy.”
Aesthetics are all that matters–as long as your willing to allow different voices who might challenge your politics to participate.
There’s a reason why Robert Penn Warren disavowed the New Critics and championed Ralph Ellison later in life.
I’m sure we both agree that the aesthetic is political, and more than just sounds and images, but it’s also important to acknowledge many of the problematic ways that “aesthetic” theories of art have been used to oppress, historically.
you’re
I imagine if you judged blind, you’d up with a product that—as often as not—did not match the demographics you were looking for in writers. I’m sure there some people who write intensely personal things, who are Jews and write about Jews (or what have you). I’m sure there are also people writing about Jews who are not Jewish and Jewish people writing about gentiles. And at as far a speculative elements go, I’m pretty sure no writers are fairies or monsters or elves. Pretty sure. Content and context have a tenuous and highly subjective relationship.
If the context of the story is important, if the writer as a person is important to you—then you can’t completely judge blind.
I agree with you that the move toward more sociological and historical approaches to literature as a response to NC has been problematic. In an ideal world, both structural and “post-structural” approaches would work together (actually, there is hope: a lot of recent scholarship combines narrative theory with cultural studies).
there is a terrific if dated essay by Marianne DeKoven in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction ed. by Friedman and Fuchs called “Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing” in which she discusses the convergences between l’ecriture feminine and the male avant-garde and reasons from a feminist perspective for both acknowledging and rejecting these convergences.
i think about the problem of representation in terms of tradition, lineage, genealogy.
for me, i very actively write in the traditions of l’ecriture feminine and feminist/queer experimental writing (e.g. new narrative and the grotesque), and i publish, and aim to publish, mainly in publications that are committed to these traditions. these traditions are significantly if not totally different from the male/masculine avant-garde and (post?!) postmodernism that i would say feeds pretty directly into the contemporary indie lit scene. (and i’m writing with broad strokes here, with apologies.) they may be similar projects, but the shared impulse to say, dismantle the master narrative, to inject noise into the dominant whatever, come from very, very different places. (bell hooks’ essay “postmodern blackness” takes up an argument similar to this.) it’s not about gender / it is about gender / in that it’s about gendered/othered experience. like kate, i’d argue that many male-identified writers write the feminine (or even better the feminist), and many female-identified writers write the masculine. this is not about biology/genitals, this is about identity (as dynamic and not static) and experience; it’s also about what identities and experiences are more highly valued, so an argument that ‘it’s about the work, not about who writes it’ really crassly ignores the ‘who reads it’ and the subjective ways in which we read and value (or devalue) work which directly impacts who gets published and marketed and read.
i am probably repeating many things that have been said, or are being said in the time i’m spending writing this. great discussion, in any case.
The NCs weren’t concerned with aesthetic primacy. They—like many other critics, past and present—were obsessed with their own fixed mental criteria of what constitutes successful literature to the point that they largely could not read the literature. Literature—and artistic language generally—exists in reaction to prior literature. You can’t examine the effectiveness of even a single trope w/o making recourse (at least intuitively) to an entire history of forceful troping. To posit oneself even semi-successfully against the backdrop of immense art that precedes an artist requires a) a high degree of creative fertility and b) the deep intimacy with a personal “canon” of prior sublime art. Thus, no critic can properly read any artwork unless he undergoes the same imaginative effort. The NCs eschewed this and opted to judge literature by terms other than its own. They were not interested in aesthetics, no matter how much they’d deny it.
is there a “fat bias” in literary publishing? how many fat writers were published in the second issue of WAC?
And certainly aesthetics is not all that matters. If you’ve got a novel that you’ve written in order to propagate a certain ideology, then fine, whatever, good luck, I hope you make someone’s life better. But aesthetics is a huge project, and an important one, and reducing it to “the sounds of words on a page” does violence to both aesthetics and oneself.
I guess I disagree with you about how important it is to acknowledge prior stupid modes of “aesthetics.” If a person were bending over at the back in order to cater to every single dull-minded theory that came before them, they’d never get any of their own work done. History will do the dusting for us.
do ex-fatties count even if they can pass as a never-fatty?
“a lot of recent scholarship combines narrative theory with cultural studies.”
Oy, kill me now.
yeah that response was pretty a-holish and knee jerk. definitely. no sarcasm here. and i took the time out to apologize to elisa and hope that we had some positive conversation regardless of it. ill-tempered and stupid.
Why do you say that?
Narrative Theory is fun. At least I think so.
Why would the writer as person be important to me? Many writers as persons were despicable. I’m greatly interested in Dostoevsky as a writer, but given the chance to meet him as a physical person I think I would have to pass. Usually the writer-as-writer is the best part of the person.
Well, I haven’t read much narrative theory, so I freely admit that I may be being unfair. (Though I doubt it.) But I say ‘oy’ because it sounds like another pack of self-important theorists re-reading their own banal and unconsciously literalized metaphors rather than reading the literature.
oh i know what you mean michael, it’s like, i wake up in the morning and my mouth is dry so i sip some oppressing water out of my golden challis and then i slip into my executioner’s mask and my purple cape and wonder, audibly, whose toes can i step on today? then i get on a plane and fly around the world just because i have wifi so i can send mass emails syntactically filled with subconsciously oppressive messages and then i get on my super-yacht and run over small island chains and whatever children might come into my path of destruction along the way become indoctrinated into the system of syntactical oppression which i carry with me like santa’s sack of toys and i take in the salty air and think to myself, ahh, what a day! what. a. day.
The New Critics were agrarians from the South. You don’t think they were interested in “aesthetic primacy” for disingenuous reasons?
btw, I’m a Southerner and my work falls within the Southern grotesque/gothic aesthetic.
But you’ll find that a lot of the more contemporary Southern writing is post-modern-esque and doesn’t rely on some rigid aesthetic code to induce nostalgia. In fact, much of Hannah’s work explodes antebellum nostalgia. Hannah used to brag about how literary theory was stupid in interviews, yet then he would say something about how interested he was in responding to staid Southern ideals.
So there’s a writer articulating a political and social purpose behind his work, even if he was pretending not to.
awesome job, reynard. hope you feel better now that you got that out of your system!
Are you responding to me, Mike? I thought I just argued that the New Critics weren’t interested in aesthetics, even if they gave lip service to it. But yeah, they were definitely disingenuous, and if any readers find them of value in the years to come, it will because they’re sensible enough to read the NCs despite themselves.
I’m not sure how the stuff about Hannah etc. in your later paragraphs are pertinent. Are you responding to me, or have I goofed the comment thread??
Blake? Anon is asking and you once dissed my authentic admiration of nachos by saying your were an ex-fat
Shit, sorry I called you Mike. Didn’t mean to sound dismissive by using the diminutive, subconscious error.
I was responding to you, demi. I’m guilty of not reading your post closely enough and having a billion things running through my head at once.
Sorry about that.
I was responding to you, demi. I’m guilty of not reading your post closely enough and having a billion things running through my head at once.
Sorry about that.
Nah, Narrative Theory deals with stuff like point of view (focalization), space, and time. Really “writer friendly.”
Check out Bal’s “Introduction to Narrative Theory.”
Nah, Narrative Theory deals with stuff like point of view (focalization), space, and time. Really “writer friendly.”
Check out Bal’s “Introduction to Narrative Theory.”
thanks michael, you can email me at prosevangelion@gmail.com with any follow-up questions.
thanks michael, you can email me at prosevangelion@gmail.com with any follow-up questions.
No, that’s okay. I’m not interested in you misrepresenting my ideas over email. Let’s just keep it here.
No, that’s okay. I’m not interested in you misrepresenting my ideas over email. Let’s just keep it here.
oh, well, i actually have an appointment for roast a pig for my gala tonight. we’re making pina coladas! have fun!
oh, well, i actually have an appointment for roast a pig for my gala tonight. we’re making pina coladas! have fun!
Say hello to all of your post-racial, post-gender hipster friends for me at the pig party!
Say hello to all of your post-racial, post-gender hipster friends for me at the pig party!
Technically, I believe Bull published fiction for men, not necessarily by men.
Some people have mentioned taking other “otherizing” factors into consideration. Gender, however, is often relatively easy (not always) to spot by name.
Unless you happen to know writers with a variety of unique traits or make blanket requests like “we’re looking for more people with disfiguring skin conditions,” how on earth would anyone be able help increase the representation of any group (other than ones that are hinted by name)?
The content of the story (the work) and content of the person (the person) might be related, but they’re not the same. Not that anyone in particular is saying they are, just that I think Blake’s point isn’t really bs, even if it does nothing to “fix the problem.”
I know a little about disability studies. One of the guiding theories is that, historically, “disability” has always been THE “Othering” Other.
In other words, if I can simplify this a bit in general language: the oppression of a group based on race, gender, or sexual orientation has almost always coincided with “disabling” that group.
So, for instance, you get the conflation of homosexuality with mental illness, or stereotypes of physical and mental “weakness” placed on women, or racialized notions of “intelligence.”
I think this is one reason why there is often hostility toward disability from other marginalized groups.
Woo, thank you for this! I love reading about fat. Could you provide more book/article recommendations? In fact, email me if you like: r-y-a-n-p-a-r-d at google’s mail service.
This sounds kind of interesting. Are there any certain books you saw this idea developed in?
Ben: And what if u judged blind?
Hey, this is tangent to the discussion-proper going on here, but I can’t help sticking up for the amazing and innovative people at Harper Perennial–or maybe just trying to shed some light on what actually goes on at a commercial publishing house. Let’s see if I can do this without revealing any trade secrets!
It’s not that HP doesn’t have a marketing strategy–of course they do; why wouldn’t they? they’re a company selling a product–but if you only look at the evidence you want to see, you’re not going to learn anything other than what you already know.
Barb Johnson’s “More of this World or Maybe Another”- a debut short fiction collection that was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick.
Lydia Peelle’s “Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing”- a debut short fiction collection.
“Neon Angel”- a memoir by former Runaway Cherie Currie, co-authored by Harper Perennial author and non-American person (and notable ex-junkie) Tony O’Neill. This came out from It Books, which is a separate imprint, but is run by largely the same staff as those who run HP.
GIRLS TO THE FRONT: THE TRUE STORY OF THE RIOT GRRL REVOLUTION, a nonfiction book by Sara Marcus (and hey, why not throw out there that her editor is Alison Lorentzen) forthcoming this fall.
FOUR BOOKS by the great gay and/or indie writer Dennis Cooper, including several partial and full re-issues and a brand-new novel. Dennis, one of our most challenging and important living American writers, is on a major press for the first time in his career.
And hey, why not, as long as we’re brushing up on too close for comfort, why not include Kevin Sampsell and myself on the diversity list? Both of our books explore contemporary sexuality in ways that are fluid, ambivalent, and non-normative. Neither Kevin nor I are “queer writers”–and I don’t think either of us is gunning for that status–but neither are our visions of maleness or heterosexuality easily plottable on Katie Roiphe’s Mailer-Updike-Roth graph.
This isn’t to say that they aren’t selling plenty of books by men–including yours truly, whose negative capability notwithstanding tends to date women (or wish they’d still date him, as the case may be)–but if you think that “men” passes for a marketing strategy, do yourself a favor and don’t start a press of your own. If you were to go through HP’s whole catalog, starting from what they’re pushing this season, and moving through time from this Point Zero for say 18 months in both directions, you would actually see the patterns that *do* exist– (1) they like younger writers, (2) they like debuts, (3) they aren’t scared of short story collections, (4) they are keenly interested in writers that seem to have “come up” through the indie- and small-press world but seem like their work is accessible to a mainstream audience, (5) they like punk rock, (6) they like things that are on the “provocative” side, (7) they like writers who seem pro-active about promoting their work (see #4), (8) none of this stops them from publishing mid-career writers, such as Binnie Kirshenbaum to name just one, who don’t fit into most or any of the previous categories but happen to be really great, and (9) they’ll try damn near anything once–twice if it works out the first time (see “Six Word Memoir,” “Fiction Inspired by The Smiths,” and the forthcoming “The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide,” first announced on this website, co-edited by a woman named Eva Talmadge and a man named Yours Truly).
These things are always sure I’m female no matter what I paste in. Like, really, really sure.
i would like a fat blake photo.
Also, Ben, I see my blind judge question was exhaustively examined earlier (naturally)
so, forget it. Better question.
why mow?
One of the disturbing trends I’ve noticed on this site, and other sites that seem to champion more experimental forms of writing, is a kind of ahistoricism, or an idea that only “aesthetics” matter. This is a rather privileged position to hold; it must be easy to live in a world where you don’t have to “think” about pesky subjects like gender, race, class, or disability–to be above all of these matters and entirely focused on how good your sentences sound on the page.
I’m drawn to “edgy,” odd, goofy, comic, and experimental work myself. Language means a lot to me. I don’t sit down to write fiction that has a political or social point to prove. However, doesn’t the writer still need to be somewhat engaged with political and social ideas in order for any of those ideas to emanate naturally through language and craft? Honestly, some of the arguments I’ve read here lately are incredibly dated, arguments that toss around words like “realism” and “experimental” without considering their historical contexts.
For instance, I’ve read a lot of patronizing and condescending rhetoric on this site about “realism,” or, my favorite, “domestic realism,” comments that seem to imply that these aesthetics–aesthetics that have historically been used to address social and political matters, esp. for women writers–are somehow beneath more experimental writing (nevermind the fact that many of the original. postmodern writers were middle class white dudes from the northeast who wanted to forget about history, or the lack of class, regional, and ethnic diversity in much of the early “postmodern” canon). There seems to be an idea here, at times, that having a subversive aesthetic is enough.
The second one kept telling me I was weak male. Feels great to be told that by a robot.
And PS- the (10)th thing which I forgot to include- Loyalty. One thing you’ll notice about HP authors is that they tend to do several books with the imprint. Unlike most contemporary publishers, who buy a book at a time, and often drop authors if book1 doesn’t work out exactly according to plan, HP very often attempts to buy several books at once, then will release those books over the course of several successive seasons and/or years. This mode of editor-writer collaboration is very old-school, and most welcome. It provides stability, certainty, and a sense of institutional coherence that is very useful to both the writer and the author.
Okay. Love letter to HP now officially over. And of course none of this should be construed as me speaking “for” them. These reflections are offered from my position as a highly interested party, my experience as a participant observer, etc.
Sure, here are four books that I’ve read in the last year or so:
“Diability Theory,” Tobin Siebers
“Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture,” James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson
“Gendering Disability,” Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison
“Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability,” Robert McRuer
It figured out that the opening pages of Norman Rush’s Mating are written by a man, even though the first-person protagonist is female. Of course, this means that Rush failed in his attempt, unless of course he was trying to create the sort of character that would stump the likes of the Gender Genie by flying gleefully in the face of stereotype, using words like “many” and “are” and “said” and “to” which are, apparently, male fingerprints left all over the crime scene of the text.
As much as I can’t believe that this maniacally dichotomizing program is actually successful with as great frequency as they say it is, I am curious to learn more. After all, it was a computer program that figured out who the Unabomber was, no, as well as pegging Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors. That was over ten years ago, and still blows my mind.
Well i find it disturbing that a good sentence is somehow apolitical. George Orwell could get exponential on your ass with a good sentence. or:
“They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time.”
etc.
I don’t see a big “subversive aesthetic” (whatever that means) as argued strongly as “enough” here.
Then again I don’t read every comment here or even wear black jeans with an iPhone chrome clip.
What books are you referencing? What authors of books?
All these sentence writers seem to also know structure, theme, issues that touch some sliver of the human mind.
Experimental writers, whatever experimental means (can you do it 1000 times and still be experimental?), are experimenting politically.
The abstract form is saying no to the landscape, etc.
Because some people clearly care deeply about the associations writers bring to the table. I assume this is not just for the label-love.
Because some people clearly care deeply about the associations writers bring to the table. I assume this is not just for the label-love.
This was a really great discussion. I’m very glad it was done as a dialogue between you all as it’s allowed for a lot of range and also the sense of camaraderie has come through which I think can be overwhelmed sometimes and it’s important. there are a few things that this post got me thinking over: forgive the length.
I want to start with Blake’s point on inclusion: “This kind of shouting for emphasis on elements outside the work has always gotten under my skin. I want language, ideas, words, image, and that, for me, comes from all over, and the body is the last most important influence. This isn’t fashion or sports, where it’s all body and prowess of flex. It’s mind, light, spirit, blood.” In the first place, I actually agree with the emphasis on the last four things: they fascinate me too. I think we are very ripe right now for a return of Ideas in the capital sense, or, in other words, things which reach beyond the question of how we know them to what they are in a way that pertains to reality more largely, beyond the uncertainty principle of the mind. I think we are ready to deal with reality, or, better, time has run short in which we can put these questions off any longer.
But – as has been pointed out by Amy, where she asks “who says one cannot be concerned with gender disparities, and other political matters, as well as being interested in other writerly-issues such as aesthetics?” – the grounds for Blake’s position rely on some notion that the body is not also an idea, that the body ends at the body. I think I’ve argued before that the body goes wherever language goes because language is itself a body, never more so than when it’s turned into a body of writing. When I say that, I do not mean that wherever a male writes, the fundamental truth of that text is its maleness. Rather, what I mean to say is that the embodiment of language is what we call representation. Every book is bound by an outside that it cannot simply put away. They follow it through. Its conditions – as Benjamin argued in his own way, in his work on aura in the age of mechanical reproduction – circle it, and they, almost always, as outsides do, poke their head through, somewhere within it, even if they don’t quite break the surface. That is to say, a book is still a book. It is not everything. It is still only one door to the all that it wishes to maintain lies within it, for the time of its duration. To me, the all is no less all for this necessity of an entrance, but nor is the entrance less the way in simply because infinity lies beyond the door.
To put it in concrete terms: X is a male writer. Okay. That tells us very little of anything about what he writes or how or why. And even less of the what, how and why matter if we are examining the political motives: X might be a male, say, but a staunch feminist. However, say he were, indeed, a feminist (in fact, he’s more likely to be today than not, in our age of ‘equality). Notice that with enough male feminists, there isn’t any need – or room – for female feminists anymore. In many ways, that sums up our hypocritical reactions toward the dis- or under-enfranchised today. By becoming ‘conscious’, and allowing a degree of representation (i.e. tokenism), we are in a better position than ever to allow the organisation of disparity to continue, even in the forward thinking realm of experimentalist representation. As Nina Power writes, there is a genealogical dimension to this appropriation freeze-out: in aesthetic history, “the ‘genius’ typically possesses feminine characteristics – imagination, intuition, emotion, madness – but is not of course an actual woman: the great artist is a feminine male, but not a feminine female or a masculine female. Women can be mad, but not aesthetically inspired, or they can be sane, and provide comfort for the true creators, who are a little bit womanish, but not too much.” This is why I have an issue with Blake, perhaps more than any other thing, when he says: “So, then, if your most central focus (or one of your foci) is that, great, that is yours. There are no laws. For me, it’s spheres, and politics is shit compared to opening other doors.” This idea that the politics of representation is a thing that’s free to be yours and not mine is such an issue because it turns the fact of a public reality into a simple matter of private choice. It’s interesting Blake speaks of spheres, here, since separate spheres has always been a way of operating the gender divide: especially now, when women are in public and work, but are chronically paid less for the same work, promoted far less, must still provide primary care to families as well as provide full-time labour. That is to say, there are laws, today more than ever. And it takes a certain – and, yes, privileged – relation to the law to have the conviction that there are no laws, equal for everyone, in quite this way.
Anyone who writes today – who has the ‘time’ to write – probably is (relatively speaking) privileged. (Though this, too, raises a whole other battery of questions about writers who are completely beyond this conversation: the people who do write without ‘time’ to write and, may I say, there are enough examples of outsider art and belatedly recovered writings or authors who die or stop writing because of their particular bodies (Tim Dlugos comes to mind) to more than convince me that conditions have already narrowed the field of this conversation down: writers are not inherently privileged, the treatment of them as ‘writers’ is inherently privileged; it’s just that even a pursuit as financially unrewarding as writing today, in the West, is that much a commodity it seems as if all writing everywhere must be an act of privilege). But that argument about the relative privilege of all writers as an indication in itself that discrimination and exploitation is an elective issue is a cop out. It’s a sort of relativism and a false syllogism: all writers are privileged, minority writers are writers, hence minority writers are privileged.
This leads me to another point: on apolitical art. If I’m arguing that art has a politics, what I’m not saying is that art may not be apolitical. I think this conversation has helped me understand something I couldn’t quite grasp before: that maybe it’s the concern over whether art can ever be about anything ‘other’ than politics that fuels Blake’s stance in this debate. Apolitical art is actually one of my favourite kinds of art. But there are some fundamental misunderstandings about what apolitical means. To be apolitical is actually not something so simple as not caring or knowing about politics: that’s actual pure politics. Rather, apoliticism is about a knowing decision to disengage.
Here’s a good example: in Saramago’s Seeing, elections are held. But nobody in the population votes. Everyone sends back their ballot blank. This sudden and total withdrawal of the people from the social institutes mass crisis in its management. The social symbols of power matter in a very material way, we learn, and without the empty crown of the people to rule in the name of the government cannot govern and reveals itself as the naked dictatorship it was all along. But since the people wont even respond to that, it just falls apart. Yet notice that in order for this withdrawal to work, for the people to send their ballots back blank, they all have to be registered as voters. They have to be politically certified. If they weren’t registered, their apoliticism would merely maintain the status quo: for the drastic drop in representation would not prevent a minor proportion of the population ‘legitimately’ returning a government to power in a system of ‘free’ choice on whether to vote or not. This is basically the state of the voluntary vote in the United States or all other Western countries without mandatory voting laws (which, you’ll see, have all swung to the Right far more sharply in the last thirty years than countries which make the population vote). In the last election, the voter turnout in the US was about 62% of the voting age population (at least, of the voters counted by census statistics: leaving out the large numbers – like illegal immigrants – or certain groups – like certain sex workers – unrepresented). Here, you have a thirty-eight percent abstention in the eligible voting population – we’re talking tens of millions of people – and yet it is as if that gaping void means nothing because their voice is not mandated to count from the outset. They are not required to vote – hence, if they don’t, rather than a crisis, it’s a non-event, or, even worse, an “issue”, something for pundits to wring their hands over then go for lunch.
This has been a long tangent but here’s its point. Apolitical art is actually oriented in a political context from which it withdraws. It sets up its architecture so that its withdrawal is oriented to its context. This is not to say that apolitical art has a political agenda – no more than the population in Saramago’s book has any clear instructions on what it ‘wants’ – but it isn’t just absenting itself without disruption to the system conditions that bind it. Experimentalism demands exactly such disruptions and this is exactly why it’s not good enough for issues of discrimination to be some people’s thing and not others. It needn’t be the manifest theme of one’s art – real conditions of impoverishment, exploitation, division of labour may not feature in the work at all: take, for instance, Oulipo. But, like Oulipo, what makes the work so genuinely exploratory and new is that its look elsewhere is predicated on its very deep consciousness of the system from which it is withdrawing. To turn this into a matter of ‘free choice’ is, basically, to take on the high politics of affirming your ‘choice’ not to have a position simply because a political position that simply doesn’t ‘feel’ like politics – which is, no offense, how political positions of privilege always feel. Apolitical art evacuates positionality: it doesn’t deny, however, that position matters.
So to Blake’s question on the politics of representation: “It matters to you, but does that mean it has to for others?”, the answer is yes, it does. Or, to put it another way, if it doesn’t matter to others, I don’t want to be told by those selfsame others to whom it does not matter that they are simultaneously uninterested in the politics that inform things while also simultaneously masters of impartiality and fair-mindedness. And – not targeting Blake here, but speaking more broadly – isn’t that essentially how the hypocrisy of this idea is played out? That the people for whom such issues don’t matter are also simultaneously the first to insist that they are – essentially; they’re always humble and full of human fraility, they could do better, but essentially -they are always already on top of the game, are already a broad church when it comes to this? Or, alternatively, though completely contradictorily, aren’t doing any real harm by that stuff not mattering to them? The argument for ‘caring only about the work’ effortlessly carries ‘the work’ to already exist its fullest most inclusive and emancipatory sense. Yet the need to put off any ethical consequences – to say the work is already complete, rather than own up to one’s partiality {“I can’t be bothered to read what gay writers have to say”), to have the cake and say it doesn’t exist too – is precisely how independence of mind is ideologized as essentially a natural right, when it is actually formed out a conditional monumentalisation of the mind, of a camel being forced through the eye of a needle and the meat being declared ‘the stuff of us all’. This is not to argue that people do not exercise autonomy in their imagination but rather that it isn’t this sort of automatic thing or that the form of that autonomy is equal to everyone. The imagination is not a realm where history goes away: like religion, the only way to share the imaginative realm is to forge real collective ties in reality. (Hence, by the way, the importance of rituals.) Again, though, such real connectivities does not mean that the imagination is only those in the last resort but nor does it mean the imaginative worlds of Christianity and Confucianism bear no real differences at all because they’re all religions. In actual fact, it is precisely the difference the real allows that enables imagination to be infinite. And it takes imagination, too, to think about what one must do to form and unbind ties in reality. This is exactly the imagination, or aesthetics, that I believe Amy means when she asks: “Aren’t we large-thinking humans, capable of all sorts of considerations? Why must one consideration obliterate any others for you?” None of this is incompatible in the slightest with open consideration of the politics of representation nor does it reduce it to the false freedom of private choice or extraneousness.
One final point. At one stage, Blake says:
“What if we started counting issues of how many non-white writers were in a magazine? How many homosexuals? How many raised in the South? How many who have mothers with cancer? These are perspective influencers that hold just as thick a prowess over a person’s mind as having a certain organ does. How can we catalyze all of these elements into a truly “equal” ground. We can’t. And even if we could, should every one? Is it every person’s responsibility to place the same emphasis on social determinism? If you are into that, go for it. But to me, again, I care about the work. And I don’t think having a penis means I am male gendered. In most of my relationships, I have as many female characteristics as I do male, if not more toward the former.”
I’ve addressed my problem with the “if you are into that, go for it” part of this paragraph above and how it sets up a bogus distinction between ‘sidebar’ issues and “the work”. In truth, concern with “the work” demands concern with the sidebar unless you take “the work” to mean whatever floats toward you by virtue of the atmosphere around you. Actually, the happening upon writers is a vital part of the discovery of good writing – so atmosphere absolutely does matter – but once more this raises the question of the atmosphere that allows what work to come to you and also the assumption that the work is pre-understood as being comprehensive by nature, without any ‘artificial’ interventions that would “quota” (or, I would insist, simply retool) its scope. But there’s another thing here and that’s the idea that factoring in difference leads to some ludicrous outcome where all the dizzying axes of psychology, body, history and matter must be accommodated and that this is impossible, so this conversation is pointless. Yet, what this rush to finish implies is that all differences are basically the same and, thus, should be treated so. However, the whole point of difference is that it is marked (or erased) differently and so demands different methods of response in terms of its peculiar disenfranchisement or underenfranchisement. While being gay, fat, or coming from the South are definitely “perspective influencers that hold just as thick a prowess over a person’s mind as having a certain organ does”, and while it would evidently be violations of privacy and taste to email all the potential contributors to your journal, asking them are they gay, or fat, or Southern, tell me your every thing about your life ever, none of this means you would stop looking for stories that may, in some way, deal with fat innovatively, or which would think the South in some specific way. For that matter, if you think you’ve really read the sex parts of a lesbian or gay story by thinking of it as “just sex”, you haven’t at all. In a way, the ludicrous conclusion of an impossible representation – what I’d call a difference-engine – is exactly what literature is. But the problem is that the difference-engine, in its material facet, of publication, text, seems to be willing to arrange the center of representation along certain axes predominantly. It is here – at the point where we stare straight down the barrel of the difference indifference of the difference-engine – that we come up against its elitism, its exclusion, often its exploitation. This is why it matters to actively seek out writers in terms of gender or race or sexuality or able-bodiedness. These are not differences among differences but differences that the difference-engine itself powers itself on suppressing and barring from altering the machine itself.
Now, in some instances, like gender, it may seem ‘easier’ to read for difference – theoretically, you don’t need to email someone called ‘Barbara’ and ask if they’re a woman (of which more in a moment). But that ‘ease’ in the case of gender only goes how fucking extraordinary it is that there’s this very palpable recalcitrance to even go that far – let alone the differences that really require work to represent, like sexuality. That you take different tactics for different differences is exactly right. As I’ve said before, if it feels ‘artificial’ to include women writers in some degree because they are women (though it’s a sexist assumption, not a feminist assumption, that including a woman as a woman thereby means you have to lower the bar of talent; what it does mean is you might have to re-orient your deadlines, make specific calls for women contributors, try to extend your networks to encompass enclaves where you can appeal for submissions to a wider number of women writers etc.), if this feels ‘artificial’, it’s only because the status quo is so cloyingly oriented even today toward old Mr. Straight-White. Lily Hoang is right: it’s not so much an issue for a woman to be published now but for women, in the general sense of the category, it’s become even harder precisely because it’s not so much of an issue for a woman to be published. And, on this, to go back to ‘Barbara’, for a moment. The question of whether you know Barbara is a woman raises an important question, one of the most important: what about transgendered authors? The ones who are really at odds and in the know about gender? I don’t mean to be offensive – and I would love to be proven wrong – but can anyone here name me even one transgendered writer or artist (without looking up online)? Has anyone here ever published or corresponded with a transgendered writer? Now, I can tell you it is absolutely not because transgendered persons do not want to write. Or aren’t inherently talented enough, whatever the fuck that would mean. Or aren’t writing or producing art. It’s because there is absolutely no scanning or encouragement or institutional welcoming, just a white noise of disinterest and, often, a buzz of hostility when the topic is brought up and it upsets the sense we’re as universal as we’d like to think we are. To me, the fact that we can tell gender in some ways – and the fact that can help us enfranchise in some ways – does not mean we have solved the problem of gender. Solving the problem of gender is not what this is about. It’s about the difference-engine becoming really different so that the engine itself does not look the same. I think this is a task that falls heaviest on experimentalist artists (and intakers of experimental art) more than any other group, for the obsessive interest in – and, yes, even love of – art here is not present in almost any other place in society and so it is here that the difference matters. And that’s what troubles me most about all of this, I guess: if we can’t make this consciousness count here, then where?
Wait a minute: you never see the conflation of “boring, unoriginal writing that is ‘realistic’ with “realism” on this site? Seriously? I don’t read all of the posts here either, and I don’t have a bibliography for you, but I’ve read enough comments over the last year or so to notice the “trend.”
There’s a difference between work that is boringly “realistic” and the aesthetic of “realism” (I’m assuming that when we discuss aesthetic, we’re not myopic enough to define an entire aesthetic based on work that is nothing but a poor imitation and boringly unoriginal). The best realism is not boring, nor is it ‘realistic.’ Good realism ain’t “real.”
I never said that a good sentence was “apolitical,” either. In my post, I thought I was clear in saying that the best political and social fiction feels natural–the aesthetic and commentary (for lack of a better word) are intertwined, and part of an organic process (and yes, I understand that “social’ and “political” can mean many different things, and that a conscious subversion of style is, in many ways, “political”).
I was responding to a trend I’ve noticed in some of the comments here lately that take the political and social in fiction for granted. As far as I’m concerned, any writer worth his or her salt should have no problem pointing out the political and social issues addressed in his or her work, and their relationship to aesthetic. Even the late Victorian “aesthetic” writers like Wilde who are often portrayed as dandyish hedonists were clearly responding to mid-Victorian ideas of utility and pragmatism in their fiction and poetry.
You write that “experimental writers” are experimenting politically (and I’m sure many of them are). Well, then, these writers should have no problem acknowledging the political nature of their aesthetic, and stating how–specifically–their aesthetic functions politically and socially. If the answer is just, “oh, well, I’m just tired of all of the boring ‘realism’ I read in MFA lit mags,” then they have a long way to go to be convincing. Also, what you’ll notice in many of these discussions is that white, straight, able-bodied writers are the ones who are most flippant. As a disabled writer, it’s impossible for me to take the political and social for granted in these discussions, and reduce most everything to “aesthetic,” because the predominant aesthetic in my culture tells me that my experience is–mostly–only worth writing about gratuitously.
At the end of the day, then, what it comes down to is honesty and the willingness to articulate the political and social in one’s fiction; reducing gender to “penis” and “vagina” doesn’t really advance the discussion, and since this is a discussion, all we can go on are the comments people post.
I think it’s unfair to reduce aesthetics to “how things sound on the page.”
And who has argued that -only- aesthetics matter? I know that I only argue for its primacy.
There is literally no distinction between a subversive aesthetic and and an effective (well-wrought) aesthetic. Oftentimes what is labeled as a “subversive aesthetic” is the exact opposite.
I sense that the New Critics were the worst thing to ever happen to aesthetic criticism. The way that aesthetic criticism (or even a generally aesthetic perspective) is instantly conflated with an aversion to extra-textual criticism is nauseating.
There is a long history of privileged writers in this country coding “aesthetics” as a means to avoid history and social issues. New Criticism was partly based on this idea of “aesthetic primacy.”
Aesthetics are all that matters–as long as your willing to allow different voices who might challenge your politics to participate.
There’s a reason why Robert Penn Warren disavowed the New Critics and championed Ralph Ellison later in life.
I’m sure we both agree that the aesthetic is political, and more than just sounds and images, but it’s also important to acknowledge many of the problematic ways that “aesthetic” theories of art have been used to oppress, historically.
you’re
I imagine if you judged blind, you’d up with a product that—as often as not—did not match the demographics you were looking for in writers. I’m sure there some people who write intensely personal things, who are Jews and write about Jews (or what have you). I’m sure there are also people writing about Jews who are not Jewish and Jewish people writing about gentiles. And at as far a speculative elements go, I’m pretty sure no writers are fairies or monsters or elves. Pretty sure. Content and context have a tenuous and highly subjective relationship.
If the context of the story is important, if the writer as a person is important to you—then you can’t completely judge blind.
I agree with you that the move toward more sociological and historical approaches to literature as a response to NC has been problematic. In an ideal world, both structural and “post-structural” approaches would work together (actually, there is hope: a lot of recent scholarship combines narrative theory with cultural studies).
there is a terrific if dated essay by Marianne DeKoven in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction ed. by Friedman and Fuchs called “Male Signature, Female Aesthetic: The Gender Politics of Experimental Writing” in which she discusses the convergences between l’ecriture feminine and the male avant-garde and reasons from a feminist perspective for both acknowledging and rejecting these convergences.
i think about the problem of representation in terms of tradition, lineage, genealogy.
for me, i very actively write in the traditions of l’ecriture feminine and feminist/queer experimental writing (e.g. new narrative and the grotesque), and i publish, and aim to publish, mainly in publications that are committed to these traditions. these traditions are significantly if not totally different from the male/masculine avant-garde and (post?!) postmodernism that i would say feeds pretty directly into the contemporary indie lit scene. (and i’m writing with broad strokes here, with apologies.) they may be similar projects, but the shared impulse to say, dismantle the master narrative, to inject noise into the dominant whatever, come from very, very different places. (bell hooks’ essay “postmodern blackness” takes up an argument similar to this.) it’s not about gender / it is about gender / in that it’s about gendered/othered experience. like kate, i’d argue that many male-identified writers write the feminine (or even better the feminist), and many female-identified writers write the masculine. this is not about biology/genitals, this is about identity (as dynamic and not static) and experience; it’s also about what identities and experiences are more highly valued, so an argument that ‘it’s about the work, not about who writes it’ really crassly ignores the ‘who reads it’ and the subjective ways in which we read and value (or devalue) work which directly impacts who gets published and marketed and read.
i am probably repeating many things that have been said, or are being said in the time i’m spending writing this. great discussion, in any case.
The NCs weren’t concerned with aesthetic primacy. They—like many other critics, past and present—were obsessed with their own fixed mental criteria of what constitutes successful literature to the point that they largely could not read the literature. Literature—and artistic language generally—exists in reaction to prior literature. You can’t examine the effectiveness of even a single trope w/o making recourse (at least intuitively) to an entire history of forceful troping. To posit oneself even semi-successfully against the backdrop of immense art that precedes an artist requires a) a high degree of creative fertility and b) the deep intimacy with a personal “canon” of prior sublime art. Thus, no critic can properly read any artwork unless he undergoes the same imaginative effort. The NCs eschewed this and opted to judge literature by terms other than its own. They were not interested in aesthetics, no matter how much they’d deny it.
And certainly aesthetics is not all that matters. If you’ve got a novel that you’ve written in order to propagate a certain ideology, then fine, whatever, good luck, I hope you make someone’s life better. But aesthetics is a huge project, and an important one, and reducing it to “the sounds of words on a page” does violence to both aesthetics and oneself.
I guess I disagree with you about how important it is to acknowledge prior stupid modes of “aesthetics.” If a person were bending over at the back in order to cater to every single dull-minded theory that came before them, they’d never get any of their own work done. History will do the dusting for us.
“a lot of recent scholarship combines narrative theory with cultural studies.”
Oy, kill me now.
Why do you say that?
Narrative Theory is fun. At least I think so.
Why would the writer as person be important to me? Many writers as persons were despicable. I’m greatly interested in Dostoevsky as a writer, but given the chance to meet him as a physical person I think I would have to pass. Usually the writer-as-writer is the best part of the person.
Well, I haven’t read much narrative theory, so I freely admit that I may be being unfair. (Though I doubt it.) But I say ‘oy’ because it sounds like another pack of self-important theorists re-reading their own banal and unconsciously literalized metaphors rather than reading the literature.
oh i know what you mean michael, it’s like, i wake up in the morning and my mouth is dry so i sip some oppressing water out of my golden challis and then i slip into my executioner’s mask and my purple cape and wonder, audibly, whose toes can i step on today? then i get on a plane and fly around the world just because i have wifi so i can send mass emails syntactically filled with subconsciously oppressive messages and then i get on my super-yacht and run over small island chains and whatever children might come into my path of destruction along the way become indoctrinated into the system of syntactical oppression which i carry with me like santa’s sack of toys and i take in the salty air and think to myself, ahh, what a day! what. a. day.
The New Critics were agrarians from the South. You don’t think they were interested in “aesthetic primacy” for disingenuous reasons?
btw, I’m a Southerner and my work falls within the Southern grotesque/gothic aesthetic.
But you’ll find that a lot of the more contemporary Southern writing is post-modern-esque and doesn’t rely on some rigid aesthetic code to induce nostalgia. In fact, much of Hannah’s work explodes antebellum nostalgia. Hannah used to brag about how literary theory was stupid in interviews, yet then he would say something about how interested he was in responding to staid Southern ideals.
So there’s a writer articulating a political and social purpose behind his work, even if he was pretending not to.
awesome job, reynard. hope you feel better now that you got that out of your system!
Are you responding to me, Mike? I thought I just argued that the New Critics weren’t interested in aesthetics, even if they gave lip service to it. But yeah, they were definitely disingenuous, and if any readers find them of value in the years to come, it will because they’re sensible enough to read the NCs despite themselves.
I’m not sure how the stuff about Hannah etc. in your later paragraphs are pertinent. Are you responding to me, or have I goofed the comment thread??
Shit, sorry I called you Mike. Didn’t mean to sound dismissive by using the diminutive, subconscious error.
I was responding to you, demi. I’m guilty of not reading your post closely enough and having a billion things running through my head at once.
Sorry about that.
Nah, Narrative Theory deals with stuff like point of view (focalization), space, and time. Really “writer friendly.”
Check out Bal’s “Introduction to Narrative Theory.”
thanks michael, you can email me at prosevangelion@gmail.com with any follow-up questions.
No, that’s okay. I’m not interested in you misrepresenting my ideas over email. Let’s just keep it here.
oh, well, i actually have an appointment for roast a pig for my gala tonight. we’re making pina coladas! have fun!
Say hello to all of your post-racial, post-gender hipster friends for me at the pig party!
Because some people clearly care deeply about the associations writers bring to the table. I assume this is not just for the label-love.
Really? I’d love to meet Dusty in person.
Or, to give another example, my enjoyment of Ben Jonson’s plays was noticeably enhanced when I learned that he’d killed a guy, avoided prison because of a loophole that gave speakers of Latin legal immunity (a law intended for clergy before the time of growing literacy), and had some sweet tattoo branded on his thumb instead to mark him as a murderer. Dammnnnn
Really? I’d love to meet Dusty in person.
Or, to give another example, my enjoyment of Ben Jonson’s plays was noticeably enhanced when I learned that he’d killed a guy, avoided prison because of a loophole that gave speakers of Latin legal immunity (a law intended for clergy before the time of growing literacy), and had some sweet tattoo branded on his thumb instead to mark him as a murderer. Dammnnnn
ben brooks, ladies and gentlemen ;)
ben brooks, ladies and gentlemen ;)
Michael,
Thanks for that clarification. I mostly agree with what you say here (the last post) but I see most experimental writing today as pushing back, responding, commenting on current climates outside the writing.
Example, the sub-genre of apocalyptic writing. It seems to have burgeoned recently and I’m not buying we all are in the wake of The Road.
Much of it is experimental (my definition) and clearly (to this reader) political. It is representative of our environ, economy, perpetual reality of warfare, etc.
It’s form and collapse of, it’s sentences (often a mix if poetic juxtaposed with terror/horror/jagged now), everything, speak to me of political sensibilities in the writer and work.
Like Wilde, these writers are showing us ourselves.
Michael,
Thanks for that clarification. I mostly agree with what you say here (the last post) but I see most experimental writing today as pushing back, responding, commenting on current climates outside the writing.
Example, the sub-genre of apocalyptic writing. It seems to have burgeoned recently and I’m not buying we all are in the wake of The Road.
Much of it is experimental (my definition) and clearly (to this reader) political. It is representative of our environ, economy, perpetual reality of warfare, etc.
It’s form and collapse of, it’s sentences (often a mix if poetic juxtaposed with terror/horror/jagged now), everything, speak to me of political sensibilities in the writer and work.
Like Wilde, these writers are showing us ourselves.
megan – wonderfully put. breaking the sequence is a hugely important text for me in terms of my ideas about writing/women writing, a woman writer’s historical place within the avant-garde, etc. the part 2 in this discussion I bring up christine brooke-rose’s “mistresspiece” essay published in that collection. and i think we definitely locate our writing within the same traditions (l’ecriture feminine, new narrative), avant-garde traditions that have been oppositional to postmodernism, the main avant-garde.
megan – wonderfully put. breaking the sequence is a hugely important text for me in terms of my ideas about writing/women writing, a woman writer’s historical place within the avant-garde, etc. the part 2 in this discussion I bring up christine brooke-rose’s “mistresspiece” essay published in that collection. and i think we definitely locate our writing within the same traditions (l’ecriture feminine, new narrative), avant-garde traditions that have been oppositional to postmodernism, the main avant-garde.
You could also look at Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand, Simi Linton (sp?), and Leonard Davis.
But, I am loathe to completely put poetry in with disability studies. There are many poets with disabilities writing (myself included) who have no association with DS at all. I, in fact, find American DS not radical enough for my taste.
Someone said down further, how do we know the minority status of a writer other than by name? Well, if an editor is interested in diversity (and even if they are not) it is their JOB to know the work of a variety of poets – would it be cool, for example to use the same argument with black poets? But this would mean to folliow the truth that physical disability is another minority (like gay, black, and women) and for whatever reason most able-people (like sean and anonymous) refuse to look at disabled people this way. They still want to view disability as personal/problem personal/tragedy. This is why, say sidewalks aren’t accessible, because if you are crippled, well too bad, that’s your fault.
For closing, a short list of poets who are disabled or write about being disabled: Jennifer Bartlett, Paul Guest, Illya Kaminsky, Ellen Smith, Norma Cole, Bernadette Mayer, Sheila Black, Steven Kuustico (sp?), Laurie Lambeth, Petra Kuppers, Larry Eigner, Julian Weiss, Eli Claire, Ona Gritz, Vassar Miller, Nathaniel Say, Laura Hersey…this is just for starters.
You could also look at Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand, Simi Linton (sp?), and Leonard Davis.
But, I am loathe to completely put poetry in with disability studies. There are many poets with disabilities writing (myself included) who have no association with DS at all. I, in fact, find American DS not radical enough for my taste.
Someone said down further, how do we know the minority status of a writer other than by name? Well, if an editor is interested in diversity (and even if they are not) it is their JOB to know the work of a variety of poets – would it be cool, for example to use the same argument with black poets? But this would mean to folliow the truth that physical disability is another minority (like gay, black, and women) and for whatever reason most able-people (like sean and anonymous) refuse to look at disabled people this way. They still want to view disability as personal/problem personal/tragedy. This is why, say sidewalks aren’t accessible, because if you are crippled, well too bad, that’s your fault.
For closing, a short list of poets who are disabled or write about being disabled: Jennifer Bartlett, Paul Guest, Illya Kaminsky, Ellen Smith, Norma Cole, Bernadette Mayer, Sheila Black, Steven Kuustico (sp?), Laurie Lambeth, Petra Kuppers, Larry Eigner, Julian Weiss, Eli Claire, Ona Gritz, Vassar Miller, Nathaniel Say, Laura Hersey…this is just for starters.
Roxann,
I do have say..it’s hard to follow the conversation when non-serious troll comments are not edited. Why do you choose not to moderate comments – Harriet, Ron Silliman, The New York Times, and so many others do. I think it adds a level of professionalism and seriousness. By allowing trolls to comment and say stupid/offensive things (which I’m sure they will after this post – come on guys!) the magazine alienates real thinkers who want to have a conversation and alienates readers.
Roxann,
I do have say..it’s hard to follow the conversation when non-serious troll comments are not edited. Why do you choose not to moderate comments – Harriet, Ron Silliman, The New York Times, and so many others do. I think it adds a level of professionalism and seriousness. By allowing trolls to comment and say stupid/offensive things (which I’m sure they will after this post – come on guys!) the magazine alienates real thinkers who want to have a conversation and alienates readers.
[…] Kate Zambreno, Amy King and Roxane Gay began their own conversation on the same subject, “But What About Nipples? A Nice Conversation (Pt. 1).” The conversation was initiated in response to a recent posting on the website about an […]
I think “real thinkers” ought to be able to withstand a little trolling.
I think “real thinkers” ought to be able to withstand a little trolling.
[…] “But What About the Nipples?” A Nice Conversation (Pt. 1) […]
Free speech and the open exchange of ideas etc. There are relatively few trolls in this thread and they are pretty easy to ignore.
Free speech and the open exchange of ideas etc. There are relatively few trolls in this thread and they are pretty easy to ignore.
Really? I’d love to meet Dusty in person.
Or, to give another example, my enjoyment of Ben Jonson’s plays was noticeably enhanced when I learned that he’d killed a guy, avoided prison because of a loophole that gave speakers of Latin legal immunity (a law intended for clergy before the time of growing literacy), and had some sweet tattoo branded on his thumb instead to mark him as a murderer. Dammnnnn
More and more discussions like these are needed. Necessary. Each person made invaluable contributions, but I would like to single out questions posed by Amy King as most relevant, in my opinion, to future discussions and whatever new questions they “engender”. Amy’s questions were and I quote: “I’m asking how are these things connected, why is that identifiably male writers are historically prioritized, published, canonical, and discussed? What is it, beyond their names and penises, about their work that is masculine? Why is that celebrated? What “feminine” aspects of a text aren’t touted in the majority? Why are writers of the feminine considered fringe or experimental? What qualities of their/our work aren’t celebrated and why?” I look forward to more. Thank you to all.
More and more discussions like these are needed. Necessary. Each person made invaluable contributions, but I would like to single out questions posed by Amy King as most relevant, in my opinion, to future discussions and whatever new questions they “engender”. Amy’s questions were and I quote: “I’m asking how are these things connected, why is that identifiably male writers are historically prioritized, published, canonical, and discussed? What is it, beyond their names and penises, about their work that is masculine? Why is that celebrated? What “feminine” aspects of a text aren’t touted in the majority? Why are writers of the feminine considered fringe or experimental? What qualities of their/our work aren’t celebrated and why?” I look forward to more. Thank you to all.
Thank-You demi-puppet!
Thank-You demi-puppet!
ben brooks, ladies and gentlemen ;)
And the trolls should ignore Roxane Gay. Pretty easy.
And the trolls should ignore Roxane Gay. Pretty easy.
In a perfect world.
In a perfect world.
Michael,
Thanks for that clarification. I mostly agree with what you say here (the last post) but I see most experimental writing today as pushing back, responding, commenting on current climates outside the writing.
Example, the sub-genre of apocalyptic writing. It seems to have burgeoned recently and I’m not buying we all are in the wake of The Road.
Much of it is experimental (my definition) and clearly (to this reader) political. It is representative of our environ, economy, perpetual reality of warfare, etc.
It’s form and collapse of, it’s sentences (often a mix if poetic juxtaposed with terror/horror/jagged now), everything, speak to me of political sensibilities in the writer and work.
Like Wilde, these writers are showing us ourselves.
can i go out on a limb that will likely to be lost like a footprint in the sands of time…? anyway:
i can’t even begin to deconstruct how pointless the above ‘argument’ seems to be… “pointless” to me anyway. and i know how harsh it sounds to dismiss what seems to be (on the surface) rather well-intended discourse on an important matter. but as i was saying:
i’m not exactly what you would call either an old or particularly young person, but “feminist discourse” as it exists today seems to be in complete and utter shambles.
so much of it seems to just constitute complaining, and (AGAIN: HONEST SENTIMENT) i am through-and-through a bleeding heart feminist — according to the dictionary definition of the word anyway. it’s impossible to account for all of the definitions people have warped into that word… but again:
most of it reads and sounds like like defensive posturing when taken at face value, reminiscent of a kind of aimless and abject rejection to a perceived bias found in an imaginary status quo deserving of constant prodding that: yeah, stop being, like, so anti-woman, or something.
i guess what i’m trying to say is: i tried to read the above ‘discussion’ and got lost in a sargasso sea of content-free posturing, sorely in need of a stand that actually, for-the-love-of-god, means something.
i know it ‘sounds like’ i’m missing the point, but what a lot of the people that will likely be encouraged to response to these kinds of sentiments in a knee-jerk-angry way… they never seem to realize what, in fact, their arguments ‘sound like’ to others that don’t necessary share their convictions.
i will readily agree that there is an entire new generation of people out there (men and women included) that need to be reminded of how important real feminist ideals are (equality! equality! equality!), and it simply isn’t persuasive to adopt a kvetching tone.
so ladies: i’d like to hear what you think feminism means to you in one paragraph or less. take it or leave it.
and fellas: let’s see y’all grow some balls and frakin’ define this sucker once and for all. one paragraph. do it bro(s).
so what?
so what?
roight, buh’ aye due’na thenk yee habben most abaout y’thaoghts on t’subaject of all d’faynher ladies in life, ah ya toothless ole lad, effen slags be slags, then’a poppin a’down on t’pubb may’n take your fat wallet outta them there trouser sahck yeh gots there, hah ha! though aye’d say let’s naow goe, alright? bite the bitch, mayte, and get back’ta drinkin’.
Egh, well, I consider myself feminist (and I am male). Maybe I’m completely out to lunch, but this is how I conceive of it: We as a society have historically hated women in such a way that like >50% of the hate has become ingrained and institutional—has become simply “the way things are”—to the effect that a contemporary male can now lead an entire life actively yet invisibly hating women. A feminist male, I think, acknowledges this history of hatred and chooses to 1) not abide by it, 2) act politically in such a way that women are granted more material freedoms and privileges, and 3) behave in such a manner that his personal character—his ethos—is the most persuasive and unavoidably emanative argument going for the fact that an enlightened + informed + compassionate + sincere + unbudging love for women is in no way contradictory with the authentic “rugged” American masculinity that we as men have come to cherish (mostly).
[For me Emerson is perhaps the foremost example of this: Dude was a liberal free-thinker, but he was unforgivably harsh, and he did not bullshit anybody. (“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”)]
My definition of feminism is probably different from most in that I think it is generally good to speak honestly of hate and evil, etc, which is possibly a little old-fashioned. Also I place an unusual amount of emphasis on personal character, as I believe that THE MOST INFLUENTIAL argument for any ideology ever is exactly how that ideology emanates out of one given person. I think it’s important for men to show to other men, through their character, that feminism is in fact a source of masculine strength.
Egh, well, I consider myself feminist (and I am male). Maybe I’m completely out to lunch, but this is how I conceive of it: We as a society have historically hated women in such a way that like >50% of the hate has become ingrained and institutional—has become simply “the way things are”—to the effect that a contemporary male can now lead an entire life actively yet invisibly hating women. A feminist male, I think, acknowledges this history of hatred and chooses to 1) not abide by it, 2) act politically in such a way that women are granted more material freedoms and privileges, and 3) behave in such a manner that his personal character—his ethos—is the most persuasive and unavoidably emanative argument going for the fact that an enlightened + informed + compassionate + sincere + unbudging love for women is in no way contradictory with the authentic “rugged” American masculinity that we as men have come to cherish (mostly).
[For me Emerson is perhaps the foremost example of this: Dude was a liberal free-thinker, but he was unforgivably harsh, and he did not bullshit anybody. (“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”)]
My definition of feminism is probably different from most in that I think it is generally good to speak honestly of hate and evil, etc, which is possibly a little old-fashioned. Also I place an unusual amount of emphasis on personal character, as I believe that THE MOST INFLUENTIAL argument for any ideology ever is exactly how that ideology emanates out of one given person. I think it’s important for men to show to other men, through their character, that feminism is in fact a source of masculine strength.
Isn’t some of this abt how systems of power shape the process of canonization? Works by experimentalist women — whether system or w/ more miniaturist-ish scope — aren’t being used to narrate the history of lit like the system novel list Kate provided above. Feel like it goes back to her point in the initial conversations abt recovering Jane Bowles, Ann Quin, etc.
Isn’t some of this abt how systems of power shape the process of canonization? Works by experimentalist women — whether system or w/ more miniaturist-ish scope — aren’t being used to narrate the history of lit like the system novel list Kate provided above. Feel like it goes back to her point in the initial conversations abt recovering Jane Bowles, Ann Quin, etc.
That said, I kind of agree with you in that what passes for “feminist” literary criticism is oftentimes unbelievably banal, and that as far as I can see it is only marginally connected to the political ideology, and is more concerned with a certain bowdlerization of the reading process, which I will always resist. (For example, in an anthology of criticism I have, yesterday I read Fetterly’s introduction to her Resisting Reader. I would like to believe that I can resist such insipid unimaginative reading while not being labeled a sexist, but if that’s what it must be then that’s what it must be, and I will take my lumps and continue on to do my work.)
That said, I kind of agree with you in that what passes for “feminist” literary criticism is oftentimes unbelievably banal, and that as far as I can see it is only marginally connected to the political ideology, and is more concerned with a certain bowdlerization of the reading process, which I will always resist. (For example, in an anthology of criticism I have, yesterday I read Fetterly’s introduction to her Resisting Reader. I would like to believe that I can resist such insipid unimaginative reading while not being labeled a sexist, but if that’s what it must be then that’s what it must be, and I will take my lumps and continue on to do my work.)
megan – wonderfully put. breaking the sequence is a hugely important text for me in terms of my ideas about writing/women writing, a woman writer’s historical place within the avant-garde, etc. the part 2 in this discussion I bring up christine brooke-rose’s “mistresspiece” essay published in that collection. and i think we definitely locate our writing within the same traditions (l’ecriture feminine, new narrative), avant-garde traditions that have been oppositional to postmodernism, the main avant-garde.
I think Janey sometimes couches elements of serious commentary in comic exaggeration and requires a layered reading.
I think Janey sometimes couches elements of serious commentary in comic exaggeration and requires a layered reading.
There’s a difference between canonization and the history of lit that we construct. In my opinion we have very little control over the former, and if, say, Anne Carson is neglected by the contemporary accounts of lit history, inevitably she is RIGHT NOW being canonized by those sensitive readers who read her and are changed by her.
Usually I wish that those who attack the canon would realize that they in actuality wish to attack something else, and would thus redirect their aim. Our literary canon is the cumulative result of centuries of solitary sensitive reading, and it is in large part completely out of our control.
There’s a difference between canonization and the history of lit that we construct. In my opinion we have very little control over the former, and if, say, Anne Carson is neglected by the contemporary accounts of lit history, inevitably she is RIGHT NOW being canonized by those sensitive readers who read her and are changed by her.
Usually I wish that those who attack the canon would realize that they in actuality wish to attack something else, and would thus redirect their aim. Our literary canon is the cumulative result of centuries of solitary sensitive reading, and it is in large part completely out of our control.
To offer one particular example — I think several of the women flash fiction writers I know — Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith, Tiff Holland, Lydia Copeland, Meg Pokrass — write using a sensory or like intuition-driven process and focus on relationships, “small” moments, “minor” stuff (trying to show here how our language is value-laden) that while not essentially female or feminine is I think is maybe sometimes feminized, and unlikely to ever situate their work (which is often awesome) in the grand narrative of literature. I think some of this is linked w/ larger gendered (false) dichotomies in our culture and how those get projected onto texts — shit like reason vs. intuition, intellect vs. experience, etc.
…But I’m not sure we can ever fully separate what little we know abt authors’ identities from how we experience their aesthetics as readers. I remember reading something online abt a piece written by an author w/ a gender-ambiguous name that an editor assumed to be male, then rejected b/c he found the prose to “feminine” for his taste, and then in actuality, the author was a woman… or maybe it was the opposite — maybe he thought it was a woman, and rejected the “woman” because he didn’t like “feminine” prose, then found out the “woman” was a man. …Actually, I think the latter is accurate. Although either example is maybe informative in different ways? I think this shit gets dicey.
To offer one particular example — I think several of the women flash fiction writers I know — Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith, Tiff Holland, Lydia Copeland, Meg Pokrass — write using a sensory or like intuition-driven process and focus on relationships, “small” moments, “minor” stuff (trying to show here how our language is value-laden) that while not essentially female or feminine is I think is maybe sometimes feminized, and unlikely to ever situate their work (which is often awesome) in the grand narrative of literature. I think some of this is linked w/ larger gendered (false) dichotomies in our culture and how those get projected onto texts — shit like reason vs. intuition, intellect vs. experience, etc.
…But I’m not sure we can ever fully separate what little we know abt authors’ identities from how we experience their aesthetics as readers. I remember reading something online abt a piece written by an author w/ a gender-ambiguous name that an editor assumed to be male, then rejected b/c he found the prose to “feminine” for his taste, and then in actuality, the author was a woman… or maybe it was the opposite — maybe he thought it was a woman, and rejected the “woman” because he didn’t like “feminine” prose, then found out the “woman” was a man. …Actually, I think the latter is accurate. Although either example is maybe informative in different ways? I think this shit gets dicey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8&feature=related
re the picture at the top of the page, are they burning bras while WEARING bras?
re the picture at the top of the page, are they burning bras while WEARING bras?
am i real. am i thinking.
am i real. am i thinking.
“feminism is … a source of masculine strength.” dig.
i would disagree with the “historically hated” thing, mostly because ‘hate’ to me is too much of a passive act to account for the way-things-were pre-1900s for women.
and you could even argue that saying that acknowledging this “hate” puts a positive spin on the way-things-were given the total absence of basic recognition the average woman was generally given.
This veers off the lit topic a little… my experience within social justice-seeking communities and within marginalized communities is disability, if addressed at all, is thought abt solely in terms of inclusivity, ie, “is our space accessible?” (an important question, and usually the answer is no, esp if a broad range of disabilities is taken into account), and not as its own system of power & privilege on par with, and intersecting with, race, class, gender, sexuality (or, depending upon how leftist a setting I’m in, I might say white supremacy, capitalist imperialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity)… for this reason I really try to push disability as a political issue within activist communities of why I’m a part.
*of which I’m a part, not why
This veers off the lit topic a little… my experience within social justice-seeking communities and within marginalized communities is disability, if addressed at all, is thought abt solely in terms of inclusivity, ie, “is our space accessible?” (an important question, and usually the answer is no, esp if a broad range of disabilities is taken into account), and not as its own system of power & privilege on par with, and intersecting with, race, class, gender, sexuality (or, depending upon how leftist a setting I’m in, I might say white supremacy, capitalist imperialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity)… for this reason I really try to push disability as a political issue within activist communities of why I’m a part.
would that i could, friend. but youtube is obnoxiously banned where i be. what’s in the video?
*of which I’m a part, not why
I think sometimes “problematic” is a way of saying something is troubling but has elements that should be valued. In these situations, I sometimes struggle to find an alternative word. In other instances, it’s just a more polite way of saying shit’s fucked up — and in those instances, I’ve been trying to push myself to just say, “That’s fucked up.”
“Problematize” is maybe a different animal than “problematic,” though.
I think sometimes “problematic” is a way of saying something is troubling but has elements that should be valued. In these situations, I sometimes struggle to find an alternative word. In other instances, it’s just a more polite way of saying shit’s fucked up — and in those instances, I’ve been trying to push myself to just say, “That’s fucked up.”
“Problematize” is maybe a different animal than “problematic,” though.
You could also look at Michael Davidson’s Concerto for the Left Hand, Simi Linton (sp?), and Leonard Davis.
But, I am loathe to completely put poetry in with disability studies. There are many poets with disabilities writing (myself included) who have no association with DS at all. I, in fact, find American DS not radical enough for my taste.
Someone said down further, how do we know the minority status of a writer other than by name? Well, if an editor is interested in diversity (and even if they are not) it is their JOB to know the work of a variety of poets – would it be cool, for example to use the same argument with black poets? But this would mean to folliow the truth that physical disability is another minority (like gay, black, and women) and for whatever reason most able-people (like sean and anonymous) refuse to look at disabled people this way. They still want to view disability as personal/problem personal/tragedy. This is why, say sidewalks aren’t accessible, because if you are crippled, well too bad, that’s your fault.
For closing, a short list of poets who are disabled or write about being disabled: Jennifer Bartlett, Paul Guest, Illya Kaminsky, Ellen Smith, Norma Cole, Bernadette Mayer, Sheila Black, Steven Kuustico (sp?), Laurie Lambeth, Petra Kuppers, Larry Eigner, Julian Weiss, Eli Claire, Ona Gritz, Vassar Miller, Nathaniel Say, Laura Hersey…this is just for starters.
hate is passive??
hate is passive??
I think I’m pretty comfortable claiming your text and Kevin’s as queer.
I think I’m pretty comfortable claiming your text and Kevin’s as queer.
Roxann,
I do have say..it’s hard to follow the conversation when non-serious troll comments are not edited. Why do you choose not to moderate comments – Harriet, Ron Silliman, The New York Times, and so many others do. I think it adds a level of professionalism and seriousness. By allowing trolls to comment and say stupid/offensive things (which I’m sure they will after this post – come on guys!) the magazine alienates real thinkers who want to have a conversation and alienates readers.
strictly speaking, hate is an internalized emotional force.
violence (in all its glorified forms) is not.
Wow, zus, sorry to hear that.
“Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett”
Wow, zus, sorry to hear that.
“Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett”
indeed, zusya, pre-1900s attitudes about women were less like hate and more like nazi attitudes re: the jews – by which i mean, it was systematic and took sensitivity and compassion to disavow. it’s easy to say that all men who treated women worse than what is considered appropriate today were misogynists, just as it is easy to say that everyone who remained in germany during nazism was a nazi – but that certainly doesn’t make it true.
anyway, while i agree with you guys that feminism is something my generation should be aware of, i think we are, for the most part. even young people who don’t understand what it means understand what it means when you tell them what it means. when my post-racial, post-gender hipster friends and i went to school, we learned about civil rights and the feminist movement in history class. so we learned about it as something that happened in the past, in history, and like all history, it was expected to be a lesson that we would learn from and hopefully not repeat. it was like, can you believe women weren’t able to get jobs besides secretaries, waitresses, and prostitutes? what was wrong with people? it took WWII to change things? omfg, wtf, etc. of course, things are far from perfect – that much seems clear, although it’s obviously become more and more difficult to tell, which is a sign that things are getting better!
i think a lot of the reason my generation feels the way we do about this stuff is that, for us, things are different. i think most people know things are far from perfect, but we’re getting somewhere and i think the majority of people today have a better attitude/understanding of feminism and civil rights than the majority of people did in the past. and while education is, in most states, far from progressive. the young persons’ conception of the world is far different today. i mean, there are elements of historical revisionism (the good kind) in public school curriculum! ideas that used to be considered dangerous and subversive are a staple.
and i think a lot of people don’t comment on this stuff and thus don’t contribute to the discussion simply because they know they will be misunderstood, called some kind of -ism, and of course nothing will change except their feelings about themselves. so they just don’t bother and that’s probably what i should do.
indeed, zusya, pre-1900s attitudes about women were less like hate and more like nazi attitudes re: the jews – by which i mean, it was systematic and took sensitivity and compassion to disavow. it’s easy to say that all men who treated women worse than what is considered appropriate today were misogynists, just as it is easy to say that everyone who remained in germany during nazism was a nazi – but that certainly doesn’t make it true.
anyway, while i agree with you guys that feminism is something my generation should be aware of, i think we are, for the most part. even young people who don’t understand what it means understand what it means when you tell them what it means. when my post-racial, post-gender hipster friends and i went to school, we learned about civil rights and the feminist movement in history class. so we learned about it as something that happened in the past, in history, and like all history, it was expected to be a lesson that we would learn from and hopefully not repeat. it was like, can you believe women weren’t able to get jobs besides secretaries, waitresses, and prostitutes? what was wrong with people? it took WWII to change things? omfg, wtf, etc. of course, things are far from perfect – that much seems clear, although it’s obviously become more and more difficult to tell, which is a sign that things are getting better!
i think a lot of the reason my generation feels the way we do about this stuff is that, for us, things are different. i think most people know things are far from perfect, but we’re getting somewhere and i think the majority of people today have a better attitude/understanding of feminism and civil rights than the majority of people did in the past. and while education is, in most states, far from progressive. the young persons’ conception of the world is far different today. i mean, there are elements of historical revisionism (the good kind) in public school curriculum! ideas that used to be considered dangerous and subversive are a staple.
and i think a lot of people don’t comment on this stuff and thus don’t contribute to the discussion simply because they know they will be misunderstood, called some kind of -ism, and of course nothing will change except their feelings about themselves. so they just don’t bother and that’s probably what i should do.
oh cool – will be looking fwd to part 2.
oh cool – will be looking fwd to part 2.
from now on, i will only comment on women’s posts here on htmlvajajay.
from now on, i will only comment on women’s posts here on htmlvajajay.
I think “real thinkers” ought to be able to withstand a little trolling.
Free speech and the open exchange of ideas etc. There are relatively few trolls in this thread and they are pretty easy to ignore.
No it isn’t.
But even then, I don’t understand how that is passive.
No it isn’t.
But even then, I don’t understand how that is passive.
“the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
“the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
[…] Blake Butler, Kate Zambreno, Amy King and I recently had a nice, interesting, and lengthy conversation about gender, publishing and so much more, prompted by lots of things including the recent, and largely excellent discussion in Blake’s “Language Over Body” post about the second issue of We Are Champion. Over the next three days, I’m going to post that conversation and we all hope you guys join in on our conversation and share your thoughts. You can find Part 1 here. […]
More and more discussions like these are needed. Necessary. Each person made invaluable contributions, but I would like to single out questions posed by Amy King as most relevant, in my opinion, to future discussions and whatever new questions they “engender”. Amy’s questions were and I quote: “I’m asking how are these things connected, why is that identifiably male writers are historically prioritized, published, canonical, and discussed? What is it, beyond their names and penises, about their work that is masculine? Why is that celebrated? What “feminine” aspects of a text aren’t touted in the majority? Why are writers of the feminine considered fringe or experimental? What qualities of their/our work aren’t celebrated and why?” I look forward to more. Thank you to all.
Thank-You demi-puppet!
And the trolls should ignore Roxane Gay. Pretty easy.
In a perfect world.
so what?
Egh, well, I consider myself feminist (and I am male). Maybe I’m completely out to lunch, but this is how I conceive of it: We as a society have historically hated women in such a way that like >50% of the hate has become ingrained and institutional—has become simply “the way things are”—to the effect that a contemporary male can now lead an entire life actively yet invisibly hating women. A feminist male, I think, acknowledges this history of hatred and chooses to 1) not abide by it, 2) act politically in such a way that women are granted more material freedoms and privileges, and 3) behave in such a manner that his personal character—his ethos—is the most persuasive and unavoidably emanative argument going for the fact that an enlightened + informed + compassionate + sincere + unbudging love for women is in no way contradictory with the authentic “rugged” American masculinity that we as men have come to cherish (mostly).
[For me Emerson is perhaps the foremost example of this: Dude was a liberal free-thinker, but he was unforgivably harsh, and he did not bullshit anybody. (“Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.”)]
My definition of feminism is probably different from most in that I think it is generally good to speak honestly of hate and evil, etc, which is possibly a little old-fashioned. Also I place an unusual amount of emphasis on personal character, as I believe that THE MOST INFLUENTIAL argument for any ideology ever is exactly how that ideology emanates out of one given person. I think it’s important for men to show to other men, through their character, that feminism is in fact a source of masculine strength.
Isn’t some of this abt how systems of power shape the process of canonization? Works by experimentalist women — whether system or w/ more miniaturist-ish scope — aren’t being used to narrate the history of lit like the system novel list Kate provided above. Feel like it goes back to her point in the initial conversations abt recovering Jane Bowles, Ann Quin, etc.
That said, I kind of agree with you in that what passes for “feminist” literary criticism is oftentimes unbelievably banal, and that as far as I can see it is only marginally connected to the political ideology, and is more concerned with a certain bowdlerization of the reading process, which I will always resist. (For example, in an anthology of criticism I have, yesterday I read Fetterly’s introduction to her Resisting Reader. I would like to believe that I can resist such insipid unimaginative reading while not being labeled a sexist, but if that’s what it must be then that’s what it must be, and I will take my lumps and continue on to do my work.)
I think Janey sometimes couches elements of serious commentary in comic exaggeration and requires a layered reading.
There’s a difference between canonization and the history of lit that we construct. In my opinion we have very little control over the former, and if, say, Anne Carson is neglected by the contemporary accounts of lit history, inevitably she is RIGHT NOW being canonized by those sensitive readers who read her and are changed by her.
Usually I wish that those who attack the canon would realize that they in actuality wish to attack something else, and would thus redirect their aim. Our literary canon is the cumulative result of centuries of solitary sensitive reading, and it is in large part completely out of our control.
To offer one particular example — I think several of the women flash fiction writers I know — Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith, Tiff Holland, Lydia Copeland, Meg Pokrass — write using a sensory or like intuition-driven process and focus on relationships, “small” moments, “minor” stuff (trying to show here how our language is value-laden) that while not essentially female or feminine is I think is maybe sometimes feminized, and unlikely to ever situate their work (which is often awesome) in the grand narrative of literature. I think some of this is linked w/ larger gendered (false) dichotomies in our culture and how those get projected onto texts — shit like reason vs. intuition, intellect vs. experience, etc.
…But I’m not sure we can ever fully separate what little we know abt authors’ identities from how we experience their aesthetics as readers. I remember reading something online abt a piece written by an author w/ a gender-ambiguous name that an editor assumed to be male, then rejected b/c he found the prose to “feminine” for his taste, and then in actuality, the author was a woman… or maybe it was the opposite — maybe he thought it was a woman, and rejected the “woman” because he didn’t like “feminine” prose, then found out the “woman” was a man. …Actually, I think the latter is accurate. Although either example is maybe informative in different ways? I think this shit gets dicey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856CfM64w8&feature=related
re the picture at the top of the page, are they burning bras while WEARING bras?
am i real. am i thinking.
This veers off the lit topic a little… my experience within social justice-seeking communities and within marginalized communities is disability, if addressed at all, is thought abt solely in terms of inclusivity, ie, “is our space accessible?” (an important question, and usually the answer is no, esp if a broad range of disabilities is taken into account), and not as its own system of power & privilege on par with, and intersecting with, race, class, gender, sexuality (or, depending upon how leftist a setting I’m in, I might say white supremacy, capitalist imperialism, patriarchy and heteronormativity)… for this reason I really try to push disability as a political issue within activist communities of why I’m a part.
*of which I’m a part, not why
I think sometimes “problematic” is a way of saying something is troubling but has elements that should be valued. In these situations, I sometimes struggle to find an alternative word. In other instances, it’s just a more polite way of saying shit’s fucked up — and in those instances, I’ve been trying to push myself to just say, “That’s fucked up.”
“Problematize” is maybe a different animal than “problematic,” though.
hate is passive??
I think I’m pretty comfortable claiming your text and Kevin’s as queer.
Wow, zus, sorry to hear that.
“Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett”
indeed, zusya, pre-1900s attitudes about women were less like hate and more like nazi attitudes re: the jews – by which i mean, it was systematic and took sensitivity and compassion to disavow. it’s easy to say that all men who treated women worse than what is considered appropriate today were misogynists, just as it is easy to say that everyone who remained in germany during nazism was a nazi – but that certainly doesn’t make it true.
anyway, while i agree with you guys that feminism is something my generation should be aware of, i think we are, for the most part. even young people who don’t understand what it means understand what it means when you tell them what it means. when my post-racial, post-gender hipster friends and i went to school, we learned about civil rights and the feminist movement in history class. so we learned about it as something that happened in the past, in history, and like all history, it was expected to be a lesson that we would learn from and hopefully not repeat. it was like, can you believe women weren’t able to get jobs besides secretaries, waitresses, and prostitutes? what was wrong with people? it took WWII to change things? omfg, wtf, etc. of course, things are far from perfect – that much seems clear, although it’s obviously become more and more difficult to tell, which is a sign that things are getting better!
i think a lot of the reason my generation feels the way we do about this stuff is that, for us, things are different. i think most people know things are far from perfect, but we’re getting somewhere and i think the majority of people today have a better attitude/understanding of feminism and civil rights than the majority of people did in the past. and while education is, in most states, far from progressive. the young persons’ conception of the world is far different today. i mean, there are elements of historical revisionism (the good kind) in public school curriculum! ideas that used to be considered dangerous and subversive are a staple.
and i think a lot of people don’t comment on this stuff and thus don’t contribute to the discussion simply because they know they will be misunderstood, called some kind of -ism, and of course nothing will change except their feelings about themselves. so they just don’t bother and that’s probably what i should do.
oh cool – will be looking fwd to part 2.
from now on, i will only comment on women’s posts here on htmlvajajay.
No it isn’t.
But even then, I don’t understand how that is passive.
“the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
I once read an article or review (long time ago) that said “Tom Robbins writes the way Dolly Parton looks.”
I once read an article or review (long time ago) that said “Tom Robbins writes the way Dolly Parton looks.”
@demi — i tend to think that hate is much more a personal problem more so that a problem for others. but then again i guess i’m assuming mostpeople are rational enough to think through their actions. i meant to imply that this kind of “passive hate” historically directed towards women is much like what @reynard wrote:
“pre-1900s attitudes about women were less like hate and more like nazi attitudes re: the jews – by which i mean, it was systematic and took sensitivity and compassion to disavow.”
this kind of bonafide “second sex” status was so mainstream at one point, it took more effort to even acknowledge the possibility of anything changing, more so than it did to passively accept the world as it was.
he totally does
he totally does
I once read an article or review (long time ago) that said “Tom Robbins writes the way Dolly Parton looks.”
he totally does
[…] Are Champion. We thank you all so much for engaging with us on these issues. Part 1 can be found here and Part 2 can be found […]
riverrun on you crazy diamond
[…] HTML Giant talked about vaginas. Blake Butler asks: Is the only way to have diversity through flesh and organs? […]
Ahoy — if it’s not acceptable to call someone a cunt, why is it acceptable to call them a dick, prick, etc? I’m genuinely curious about this one. Equality means that either both terms are acceptable or neither are. More to the point, I don’t think it matters which gender is exploited more (in this sense, at least)–a poor woman is certainly exploited much harder than a rich one. I’m talking about the actual use and acceptability of these things. In those PC conversations you guys are always having, I feel, if someone uses the word “cunt” they’d immediately be labeled as a he-man woman hater, but if he or she were to use the word “prick,” nothing would be said or noted.
Ahoy — if it’s not acceptable to call someone a cunt, why is it acceptable to call them a dick, prick, etc? I’m genuinely curious about this one. Equality means that either both terms are acceptable or neither are. More to the point, I don’t think it matters which gender is exploited more (in this sense, at least)–a poor woman is certainly exploited much harder than a rich one. I’m talking about the actual use and acceptability of these things. In those PC conversations you guys are always having, I feel, if someone uses the word “cunt” they’d immediately be labeled as a he-man woman hater, but if he or she were to use the word “prick,” nothing would be said or noted.
*if someone were to use
*if someone were to use
Ahoy — if it’s not acceptable to call someone a cunt, why is it acceptable to call them a dick, prick, etc? I’m genuinely curious about this one. Equality means that either both terms are acceptable or neither are. More to the point, I don’t think it matters which gender is exploited more (in this sense, at least)–a poor woman is certainly exploited much harder than a rich one. I’m talking about the actual use and acceptability of these things. In those PC conversations you guys are always having, I feel, if someone uses the word “cunt” they’d immediately be labeled as a he-man woman hater, but if he or she were to use the word “prick,” nothing would be said or noted.
*if someone were to use
I haven’t finished your article nor I have I really read the comments posts, so forgive me. But just after finishing the first section. I’m kin of annoyed that the male voice in the article seems to be the focus of the article, especially since on generally grounds I am more interested in what everyone else seem to be saying. Again blakes comments are legitimate, but to hear a conversation that is supposed to be about gender issues focusing itself on whether gender is a worthwhile considerations is kind of annoying. I want to get involved in the issues, get down to it, I’m sorry I just felt it kind of annoying as a man to be represented by opinion that seemed to more often derail the interesting aspects of the conversation.
I haven’t finished your article nor I have I really read the comments posts, so forgive me. But just after finishing the first section. I’m kin of annoyed that the male voice in the article seems to be the focus of the article, especially since on generally grounds I am more interested in what everyone else seem to be saying. Again blakes comments are legitimate, but to hear a conversation that is supposed to be about gender issues focusing itself on whether gender is a worthwhile considerations is kind of annoying. I want to get involved in the issues, get down to it, I’m sorry I just felt it kind of annoying as a man to be represented by opinion that seemed to more often derail the interesting aspects of the conversation.
I haven’t finished your article nor I have I really read the comments posts, so forgive me. But just after finishing the first section. I’m kin of annoyed that the male voice in the article seems to be the focus of the article, especially since on generally grounds I am more interested in what everyone else seem to be saying. Again blakes comments are legitimate, but to hear a conversation that is supposed to be about gender issues focusing itself on whether gender is a worthwhile considerations is kind of annoying. I want to get involved in the issues, get down to it, I’m sorry I just felt it kind of annoying as a man to be represented by opinion that seemed to more often derail the interesting aspects of the conversation.