Random
“We don’t publish poets; we publish poems.”
Jane Ciabattari: Women who write in the 21st century have wider opportunities than in the past. (At one point women wrote under male pseudonyms or used initials to disguise who they were. At one point literary magazines were filled with stories by and about men and no batted an eye) But we are not in a post-feminist world. If anything, there is a bit of a backlash against the “favored” aspects of affirmative action (Which is too bad, because the point was to restore equity, not swing back). Gender roles, if anything, have shifted back to the more traditional.
I suspect one reason the major raves for the new Jonathan Franzen novel rankle some women writers is that Franzen is writing a relatively traditional nineteenth-century domestic novel, a form perfected by women over the past century, and the response he is getting seems out of proportion.
Sometimes I think on some levels it boils down to empathy. Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view, and are educated to read and give critical responses to literature by men with primarily male protagonists (we all read Moby-Dick, right? and the major war novels) as well as books by and about women. Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility, nor offered the idea that books by and about women are of equal intellectual weight.
What we need, I think, is to open the doors of imagination wide rather than favor a few authors who write about a narrow economic niche. I’ve been excited over the past year to read the work of newcomer Tiphanie Yanique, short story master Yiyun Li, the amazing Lily Hoang, who breaks the mold and puts it back together again, Jennifer Egan, who is pushing the limits of fiction in new ways with each book, and I consider them on par with the male writers whose work seems fresh and exciting to me this year.
“On Gender and Publishing”: A Panel Moderated by Carmen Giménez Smith
“Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view.”
“Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility”
These are interesting claims, but I’m not sure what they are based on. Men can’t empathize so they cannot appreciate literature written by women, who are of course more nurturing and able to see the world more completely because of their situation in the world as women…
I don’t buy it.
Men aren’t simple because they are men. Women don’t have access to a more complete version of “reality” because they are women. With these arguements, I get the impression Ciabattari is stuck in the 70s.
She isn’t arguing for some essential empathy that women possess and men don’t in all situations and at all times — I think it’s more abt the idea that marginalized groups must learn their own experience(s) as well as those of the dominant group in order to survive in the culture, whereas the systematically privileged aren’t really required to look past their own nose and may even be completely blind to the experiences of “othered” folks.
Double consciousness is another term for this.
fuck yes lily hoang
Is it just me or does her last line seem odd? “Here are 4 women who are just as good as the men I like!”
This whole identity politics thing usually ends up in a race to the bottom.
We cannot know the experiences of others.
How many consciousnesses would you say are possible in total?
thanks, tim! yes, jane has been incredibly generous to me.
Looking back to middle and highschool, any novels we were required to read together as a class were always written by male authors. I had to discover the Brontes and Eliot on my own. I realize this may be just because I went to a shitty school (seriously, not even Harper Lee), but I still think it reflects the mindset that’s imposed on readers even at a young age: that both genders should learn and enjoy books by male authors (with primarily male characters), but not vice versa. So it’s not just a natural process of men being blind to female experience because of privilege, it’s a concept introduced and socially enforced at a young age that they don’t have to (or in some cases SHOULDN’T) read female-oriented literature.
Question: If JK Rowling had made Harry Potter “Harriet Potter”, would it have lost half its readership?
The fact that this is debatable is weird. This is a fact of our society. No one is going to outright say, “You shouldn’t read female-oriented literature” because they (the educators/people) are inheriting this distinction. You can of course very much so know anothers experience. I mean, I could get into quantum entanglement and the idea of information travel (such as our ability to smell chemicals and deduce the culmination of the body/brains experiences up to a certain point, and our ability to make a decision regarding “invisible information”) — But, yeah, I grew up in a household of women and find myself constantly ‘in search of’ women creatives. The fact I have to search them out is the point. I have to search out african-american creatives and latino creatives. Less asian creatives, only because I think it harks back to our euro-centric society and asia’s long history with europeans. Although that isn’t to say asian-/asian-american creatives are so easy to find.
Most men my age aren’t empathetic towards women. Real talk. You find an interesting synchronicity between us women-raised men and those who aren’t.
I feel as if I am beginning to ramble so I’m going to stop.
I went to high school in the middle of nowhere in western PA. We read on average one novel per year, but we did manage To Kill a Mocking Bird. In any case, I have never had a teacher or professor say that one shouldn’t read “female-oriented literature,” a genre that would be hard to define without some serious essentializing, or that female authors were not as good as their male counterparts.
This word “privilege” is problematic. I think it should be reserved for people like Julian Casablancas/Paris Hilton, who come from mega wealthy parents with connections (if we have to use it at all). Is Jaden Smith not privileged? Everyone has a set of burdens, if it is not too depressing to call them that, with which they must work to achieve what it is they want to achieve.
I would say that no one should “have to” read any literature if they don’t want to.
I don’t know how the sex of a novels protagonist affects sales. I bet someone on here has read something about that though.
I don’t think it is productive to compare sexes (or genders) of authors. I prefer to evaluate the work.
That males are expected only to know male work seems like a pretty huge overstatement. Emily Dickinson is like an institution here in the US, and an educated male is certainly expected to know and understand her work, no? She’s right that books with “female” topics have been granted less weight/importance.
off-topic: I wish we could do away with the Dead White Male memes. The Stephen Kings of each era are the true DWMs. The present-day Stephen King is already a DWM.
This seems to come up about once a month here. Look up the interview with superagent Nat Sobel from a year or so back in which he avers the young male coming-of-age novel is impossible to sell now… no doubt partly due to the fact that females buy 75% of all hardcover books in the USA.
Sobel advises male authors to write thrillers if they want to sell.
julian casablancas “made it” in music because he worked hard and (a lot of people would say) is very talented, not because of his parents. and there’s always luck/chance involved.
where and how to use the word “privilege” is semantics. but one’s factual experience isn’t semantics, and someone’s experience is relevant and important to them. if you’re going to say it’s not relevant or important, obviously you can do that, but it seems insensitive. and personally i don’t think it’s possible (or desirable) to completely disregard an author’s identity.
what does “productive” mean? i assume you’re speaking from the context of critical discussion of literature, even though the person you’re speaking to has invoked personal feelings and factual experience, neither of which are necessarily in the same context as the abstract world of critical discussion of literature. to me your statement is reminiscent of the republican strategy of claiming we live in a post-racial society as an excuse to dismiss/outlaw the discussion of race as a factor in any event or any injustice. it’s convenient, dishonest, and bullshit, in my opinion. for there to be a rational, approaching-the-impossible-condition-of-fair discussion of gender issues or other issues, both parties would need to be aware of contexts and goals and avoid semantics and rhetoric that seems dishonest or narrow-minded.
> impossible to sell now
Uh, I understood it was always impossible to sell sell; publishers just stopped kidding themselves that rigged prestige games mattered as much?
I kid, I kid.
I don’t think she’s saying males are only expected to know male work–obviously there are women who are firmly enshrined in the canon, and men study them. I think she’s referring to the phenomenon where a lot of dudes don’t grow up reading Girls’ Books, and when they’re adults are less likely to pick up a book by a woman, or a book with a female protagonist, for pleasure OR serious reading.
I call it the Julie of the Wolves Problem. A lot of dudes read “My Side of the Mountain” when they were kids, which is a book about a boy living in a hollow tree and storing up impressive shitloads of acorns. Very few of these dudes also read “Julie of the Wolves,” which is a book about a girl who goes and lives with a freaking wolf pack and learns to talk wolf language! Way way butcher, but starring a girl, so: Girls’ Book.
It starts young, is what she’s saying.
The thing about JC was not to take away from whatever hard work he did/does, but you could say the same about Paris. Interesting that you don’t want to defend her…I was just setting a higher standard for the word “privileged,” which I could really do without in general. I think people employ it to mean “less of a minority than me” too often–as if every “white” person or every “hetero” person was given special super powers at birth. Like you said in your post, people with privilege (like JC) also have to work hard if they want to achieve their goals.
It is my position that power (money+connections) defines privilege, not vaginas, penises, colours…
I understand that people can and do use words however they want. I was just adding my opinion because I think, in this case, it is the minority opinion but still worthy of consideration.
Productive (for me if that isn’t clear already) means if we are talking about X author, I wouldn’t try to understand his or her literature through his or her “lived experience” — which I still maintain is fundamentally nontransferable, even if we think that it is the impetus for much literary writing.
I don’t dismiss race/gender etc. as contributing factions to injustice. I claim that the world is unjust and will continue to be unjust and that “counting noses” does not make the world more just–identity politics is not the solution to injustice.*
*I don’t know the solution to injustice.
I also don’t think you could have any discussion without semantics or rhetoric, but that’s another point…
that’s what i was thinking
i was wrong about this place being a teacher’s lounge. it’s more like a bunch of teachers watching maury povich in their precious lounge.
anyone espousing AA is a god damn cuckoo.
“I suspect one reason the major raves for the new Jonathan Franzen novel rankle some women writers is that Franzen is writing a relatively traditional nineteenth-century domestic novel, a form perfected by women over the past century, and the response he is getting seems out of proportion.”
no, she suspects this because she is a feminist which means she’s been trained to think this way. the entire statement is petty.
“Sometimes I think on some levels it boils down to empathy. Women in this culture have tended to be raised with a dual perspective, seeing both male and female points of view, and are educated to read and give critical responses to literature by men with primarily male protagonists (we all read Moby-Dick, right? and the major war novels) as well as books by and about women. Most men in this culture are not raised to have this gift for empathetic flexibility, nor offered the idea that books by and about women are of equal intellectual weight.”
wait, what, huh? how is empathy taught? how are women capable of empathy but men are incapable of it within the confines of the same system? this statement makes no fucking sense. i am adding “empathetic flexibility” to my asshole academic phrase book. putting it next to “world view.”
boys are being taught women writers are of a lesser intellectual value? how the fuck so?
“What we need, I think, is to open the doors of imagination wide rather than favor a few authors who write about a narrow economic niche. I’ve been excited over the past year to read the work of newcomer Tiphanie Yanique, short story master Yiyun Li, the amazing Lily Hoang, who breaks the mold and puts it back together again, Jennifer Egan, who is pushing the limits of fiction in new ways with each book, and I consider them on par with the male writers whose work seems fresh and exciting to me this year.”
Hi, I am open minded. I want the world to be equal. Here’s a one-sided list of female authors. Men are whatevers.
The fact that this is debatable is weird. This is a fact of our society. No one is going to outright say, “You shouldn’t read female-oriented literature” because they (the educators/people) are inheriting this distinction. You can of course very much so know anothers experience. I mean, I could get into quantum entanglement and the idea of information travel (such as our ability to smell chemicals and deduce the culmination of the body/brains experiences up to a certain point, and our ability to make a decision regarding “invisible information”) — But, yeah, I grew up in a household of women and find myself constantly ‘in search of’ women creatives. The fact I have to search them out is the point. I have to search out african-american creatives and latino creatives. Less asian creatives, only because I think it harks back to our euro-centric society and asia’s long history with europeans. Although that isn’t to say asian-/asian-american creatives are so easy to find.
Most men my age aren’t empathetic towards women. Real talk. You find an interesting synchronicity between us women-raised men and those who aren’t.
I feel as if I am beginning to ramble so I’m going to stop.
“no, she suspects this because she is a feminist which means she’s been trained to think this way”
open minded?
show me an open mind?
“Attorney General Eric Holder said the US is a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about race, and I agree to a large extent. I’d add that we’re not that great when it comes to talking about sexism either—we’d much rather act like it’s yesterday’s problem.” —- from Brian Spears over at The Rumpus (http://therumpus.net/2010/09/why-i-chose-elizabeth-alexander%E2%80%99s-crave-radiance-for-the-rumpus-poetry-book-club/)
Who doesn’t like watching Maury Povich, lounge or no lounge?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuJi5eKhpgU
I agree with Tim’s sentiment: fuck yes lily hoang!
Scoff at the feminists all you want, but you may want to consider your almost instantaneous dismissal of these ideas as “feminist” thought.
Empathy is not taught, but empathy is rewarded in women and discouraged in men through social norms. I don’t think she’s saying men are incapable of empathy, and I don’t think she’s saying men are “whatevers.”
I’ve been teaching lit for a while now and whenever I teach a book authored by a women the men in my class seem to shut down, especially if the book is both authored by a woman and narrated by a female character. I think there’s still these ideas circulating in American culture that women are incapable of bigger, deeper thoughts, that all women can write about is the microcosm, the domestic, the vapid, the superficial… I find it especially telling that women’s value’s still predicated on beauty and not intelligence in our superficial-ass society.
But horrors, that’s feminist thought…
Yeah, it’s not that we’re not expected to know about ANY women — only far fewer. And it’s socially acceptable in a surprising number of circumstances to say something sounds like a “women’s book” as a way of explaining one doesn’t want to read it: one of my instructors said it, unironically, in an interview he did recently. I was sort of stunned.
I even experience a certain social anxiety when I read or purchase or profess love for certain books because I feel that they are “for girls” and maybe people will think I’m “a girl.” Which is funny, and seems to me like strong evidence of the claim, because generally I work very hard not to credit such feelings and can ignore them when it comes to music, movies, etc., but apparently not books, which are more important to me.
Of course there are plenty of women who can’t understand or write men worth a damn either. Jane Hamilton has been my primary example since she visited Butler.
“Scoff at the feminists all you want, but you may want to consider your almost instantaneous dismissal of these ideas as “feminist” thought.”
of course i am going to scoff at feminist “thought.” why wouldn’t i?
i am not going to choose the racism of the the black panther party over the racism of the kkk.
as is the case with feminism. as is the case with misogyny.
“Empathy is not taught, but empathy is rewarded in women and discouraged in men through social norms. I don’t think she’s saying men are incapable of empathy, and I don’t think she’s saying men are “whatevers.””
an interesting interpretation. i would concur with you if i had proof of this reward system.
“I’ve been teaching lit for a while now and whenever I teach a book authored by a women the men in my class seem to shut down, especially if the book is both authored by a woman and narrated by a female character.”
then you are failing as a teacher.
“I think there’s still these ideas circulating in American culture that women are incapable of bigger, deeper thoughts, that all women can write about is the microcosm, the domestic, the vapid, the superficial…”
i half agree. maybe women should stop selling their souls and writing bullshit. don’t blame men for a lack of resolve.
an individual chooses to write a meaningless book with a pink cover or great expectations.
“I find it especially telling that women’s value’s still predicated on beauty and not intelligence in our superficial-ass society. ”
do you not hang out with chicks or something?
the largest criticism of female aesthetics is made by women.
“But horrors, that’s feminist thought… ”
thought comes from an individual. we aren’t talking about thought. we are talking about ideology.
fuck ideology.
Have you ever taught? If so, tell me how you overcome student resistance to something they don’t want to know or hear… Maybe you just throw out pithy comments and don’t care if anyone gets them, and I say this cos you’re a man and you lack empathy cos I’m a feminist and I believe every feminist thought ever cos that’s what ideology does to my feeble female brain.
The reward system is all around us; society dictates our behavior through norms and taboos. If you say you’re above society’s norms then you’re full of shit.
“Chicks” judge each other aesthetically cos they’ve internalized the value systems surrounding them; it’s a way to have power in a fucked-up system and another way of reinforcing social norms.
I’m not blaming men for anyone’s “lack of resolve.” I don’t even know what that means.
It’s easy to say fuck ideology when you come from a privileged place. And those that are most invested in privilege are the ones who are going to resist the notion of privilege itself.
this is one of my favorite conversations about empathy in writing
http://bombsite.com/issues/44/articles/1684
hi ryder
“Have you ever taught? If so, tell me how you overcome student resistance to something they don’t want to know or hear… Maybe you just throw out pithy comments and don’t care if anyone gets them, and I say this cos you’re a man and you lack empathy cos I’m a feminist and I believe every feminist thought ever cos that’s what ideology does to my feeble female brain.”
have i taught? do you mean have i ever taught someone something or have i ever taught within the education system? yes and fuck no.
i was not saying you failed to be mean, i was simply making an observation. personally, i abhor educational systems & academia. it’s more about conditioning than anything else.
my preference would be direct teaching. master/apprentice sort of thing, with a focus on the INDIVIDUAL & less about what the fuck the stupid majority is thinking.
i am not sure where you are getting all this nonsense about feeble brains.
please do not project on me.
“The reward system is all around us; society dictates our behavior through norms and taboos. If you say you’re above society’s norms then you’re full of shit.”
okay, but it doesn’t only apply to gender. you don’t care about injustice, you care about your ego.
i am not arrogant enough to say i am completely above society, but i am close.
“”Chicks” judge each other aesthetically cos they’ve internalized the value systems surrounding them; it’s a way to have power in a fucked-up system and another way of reinforcing social norms. ”
hahaha who taught you this bullshit?
“I’m not blaming men for anyone’s “lack of resolve.” I don’t even know what that means.”
the underlying meaning was that this is the 21st century, writing is solitary, self-publishing can be done with small effort.
why the fuck is someone whining about not seeing women writers? you can’t keep blaming men, the system or anyone. now, the onus is on you. you could be doing something productive instead of complaining. you could be enforcing actions instead of mouthing useless words.
“It’s easy to say fuck ideology when you come from a privileged place. And those that are most invested in privilege are the ones who are going to resist the notion of privilege itself.”
you are implying i am coming from a privileged place, right?
hmm, what is your definition of privilege?
everything i have in this life i have had to earn. i am not going to explain myself to you.
but… you should know your audience before you start throwing around the stupid privilege card.
if feminists, or anyone, actually gave a shit about changing this world, they would be teaching children how to love themselves.
the power of society and its bullshit norms dissipates in a world of true love.
i believe this to be true.
maybe i’m wrong.
hahaha you fucker
Jereme,
and a “world of true love” can only be possible if injustices are acknowledged and fucked up narratives are changed. I don’t know how you think people are going to get to this magical hippie love fest without a hell of a lot of work.
and pointing out injustices isn’t complaining. There’s a huge difference between complaining and making people aware of unfair social systems. And I don’t believe that gender is the only social construct that perpetuates injustice in the U.S. nor is it the only thing policed by norms. Class and race are also fucked-up social constructs that oppress.
Yes, I do have an ego and I do care about that ego. But that’s not all I care about…
I likes the mens a lot believe it or not. I’m not blaming men for anything. I am blaming society for creating people who refuse to read or take something seriously cos it was written by a woman or people that refuse to read something cos it’s so blue collar or whatever or people that refuse to read something cos it was written by anyone who isn’t white or people who refuse to read something cos it was written by someone who isn’t hetero or people who refuse to read something cos it was written by an “outsider,” someone who has been to prison or has lived a life not “accepted” by the majority of society and these people do exist.
Saying all I’m doing is complaining and whining is counterproductive to your argument as you don’t know me either and you don’t know what I’m doing with my life or my art. Don’t project your shit on me, either.
As far as privileged, I have worked for everything in my life as well, but I still consider myself privileged because I am white and I live in a society that has institutionalized racism. It has also institutionalized classism, sexism, and homophobia.
but, this reeks of academia, probably and you’ll probably respond with something like, “hahaha, who taught you this bullshit?” especially since what I’m saying isn’t cool or hip.
This idea of the INDIVIDUAL; have you been reading a lot of D.H. Lawrence? I thought I was an idealist, but damn.
Thanks for the dialogue. Good luck with your attempts at achieving a world of true love.