VIDA at AWP

One of the most interesting discussions I saw at the AWP conference was one sponsored by VIDA, with editors and writers talking about the results of VIDA's 2013 count of female and male writers in various publications. This year, they were able to offer a particularly revealing set of graphs showing three year trends in book reviewing at major magazines and journals.

The only report of the discussion I've seen so far is that of VIDA volunteer Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown (although I'm sure it was covered by Twitter when it happened). Hoover gives a good overview of the panel and the issues. I took lots of notes, so will here add some more detail to try to show how the discussion went.

After introductory remarks by moderator Jennine Cap籀 Crucet, the first responses were made alphabetically by last name, and so two men began: Don Bogen, poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review, and Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review. Bogen noted that, inspired by VIDA, he'd done a count of the poetry published by CR during his 7-year tenure and discovered to, really, his surprise that he'd achieved parity between male and female writers (or at least male and female bylines). How had he managed to do this unconsciously, he wondered? The best hypothesis he had was that he seeks real diversity of experience and point of view in poetry and has eclectic taste — indeed, the only poems he said he's not particularly interested in are ones that reflect his own experience. He noted that certainly the idea of parity depends on where one is counting from, as particular issues of the magazine would go one way or the other, and he tends to organize blocks of poems in between other genres in each issue in ways that have sometimes been balanced but also sometimes been entirely female or entirely male. Many times, too, he said, he does his best to read blind, paying little to no attention to a byline, and has often discovered that material he thought was "male" or "female" had been written by someone of another gender. Thus, the magic of literature.

Legitimate

Here's an important post from Atlantic senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta regarding Republican U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin's repugnant comments about pregnancy rarely occurring from "legitimate rape" (just typing those words makes my hands shake).

Franke-Ruta makes the important point that Akin is not an outlier in the world of anti-abortion zealots. His ideas are connected to those that seek to distinguish between "forcible rape" and something else. Such dangerous delusions are central to so many of the misogynistic and ignorant tenets of the anti-abortion movement and to the sorts of ideologies that seek to downplay the frequency of sexual assault and defund the institutions that attempt to address sexual violence:

Arguments like his have cropped up again and again on the right over the past quarter century and the idea that trauma is a form of birth control continues to be promulgated by anti-abortion forces that seek to outlaw all abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. The push for a no-exceptions anti-abortion policy has for decades gone hand in hand with efforts to downplay the frequency with which rape- or incest-related pregnancies occur, and even to deny that they happen, at all. In other words, it's not just Akin singing this tune.

Amanda Marcotte explores similar evidence and ideas at The Prospect:

Akin’s comment should serve as a reminder that despite its sentimentality surrounding the fetus, the anti-choice movement is motivated by misogyny and ignorance about human sexuality. In this case, what underlies the rape-doesn’t-get-you-pregnant myth is the notion that sex is shameful and that slutty women will do anything—even send an innocent man to jail to kill a baby—in order to avoid facing the consequences of their actions.

 Akin's ideas are not a gaffe.

Readercon 23

 
Last week's Readercon was among the best of the many I have attended, for me at least. Inevitably, there wasn't enough time for anything — time to see friends, time to go to all the various panels I had hoped to go to, time to mine the book dealers' wares... Nonetheless, it was a tremendous pleasure to see so many friends and acquaintances again, as well as to be immersed in such a vibrant community of people who love to talk about books.

I've been on the Programming Committee for Readercon for the past two years now, which changes my experience a little bit, because I find myself paying closer attention than I did before to how the panels end up working in reality (after we on the committee have puzzled over their possibilities for a few months) and to how people on the panels and in the audiences respond to them. (Note: We're actively trying to expand the invitation list to Readercon. If you have any names to suggest [including yourself], please see here for more info.)

I don't love being on panels myself, because I don't really have any confidence in my ability to say anything beyond the banal in an extemporaneous situation, but I was on a couple this time, and though I don't think my contributions were anything memorable, there were some good moments. (More thoughts on panels and the current discussion of gender parity on panels at cons below.)

"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women"

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People? It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
by Alice Duer Miller

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

Suffrage and Race

Over at Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez has posted a helpful overview of the complex history of civil rights struggles in the U.S., particularly the 19th century.

Just as the abolition movement spawned a struggle for women's suffrage, and the civil rights movement was the impetus for both second wave feminism and LGBT rights, the historical role of black women in the context of the suffrage movement is a key to understanding the founding of black women's clubs, sororities and political organizations. That history also explains the roots of the racial contradictions of second and third wave feminism and the development of black feminism.

She goes on to discuss the rift between Frederick Douglass and some of the most prominent white women's suffrage activists after black men were enfranchised, as well as some of the later conflicts and complexities -- a history that had some eerie resonances during the 2008 election (for a good account of which, see Rebecca Traister's Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women [a book far better than its hyperbolic subtitle might suggest]).

I was particularly interested to discover, via Velez, a review by Rebecca Edwards of the PBS documentary Not for Ourselves Alone in The Journal for Multimedia History. In the Feminism in America course that I sometimes teach, I use a few of the resources and documents from the program's website, but not the documentary itself because of exactly the limitations Edwards points to -- the oversimplification of complex and contradictory historical figures. The history is more interesting than Not for Ourselves Alone shows.

Over the past couple of decades, a lot of good work has been done to add complexity and nuance to our view of the struggle for suffrage. I'm particularly fond not only of the book Velez draws a lot of information from, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote by Roselyn Terborg-Penn, but also such books as White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States by Louise Michele Newman (pretty academic and bit tough going at times, but worth the effort -- I don't know of another book that shows the connections between racism and imperialism in the suffrage struggle so well), Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves by Deborah Gray White (among other virtues, this provides plenty of challenge to the naive view that black women somehow all have the same opinions about everything), Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith (spiritualism, free love, utopia, drugs, internecine struggles -- this book has it all!), Ida: A Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings (a comprehensive biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, which is to say: a really fascinating book), and Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland by Linda J. Lumsden (Lumsden is particularly good on contradictions of class in Milholland's life, and it's a fascinating life). That list is just some favorites I could think of off the top of my head, and it's not at all comprehensive, but just glancing at any of those will show that suffrage in the U.S. is an amazingly rich history -- and Denise Oliver Velez's post does a fine job of showing some of that richness.

Narrative, Politics, and Sexual Violence

A post by Timmi Duchamp first brought to my attention a now-infamous article in the New York Times, "Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town", which reports on a gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl by 18 men of varying ages -- from early teens to 27.

Timmi described the article as being chiefly concerned with the rapists rather than their victim, and I must admit that at first, being in a particularly optimistic and naive mood or something, I thought, "No, there's got to be some mistake -- the Times wouldn't let something like that through, would they?"

They would. They did. It's a nauseating article.

Timmi nails it, and so do Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece, "New York Times's Sloppy, Slanted Child Rape Story", and Mac McClelland at Mother Jones with "The New York Times' Rape-Friendly Reporting". Perhaps the most vivid proof that James C. McKinley, Jr's reporting for the Times for this story is rotten comes from a comparison with other reporters' approaches to the same story, which Latoya Peterson at Poynter does quite well. (Though as Irin Carmin at Jezebel pointed out, the Times isn't the only one with appalling coverage.)

"The War of the Sexes" and "The Queen Bee"

Here are links to PDFs of a couple of old science fiction stories that may be of interest to some folks. (Both, as far as I have been able to tell, did not have their copyrights renewed and so are in the public domain; I'll get rid of the links if I discover otherwise.)

"The War of the Sexes" by Edmond Hamilton was first published in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales and reprinted once, in the version I have a PDF of, in The Avon Science Fiction Reader, no. 1, in 1951. It's a terribly silly story, bad in just about every conceivable way, and pretty hilarious because of it.

"The Queen Bee" by Randall Garrett was published in the December 1958 issue of Astounding and has never been reprinted as far as I can tell. It is not even remotely hilarious. I found it, in fact, quite disturbing to read. It is a revolting story, a representation of a sick male fantasy made "necessary" by circumstances. (I suspect Joanna Russ may have had the story in mind when she wrote We Who Are About To...) But it reveals certain truths and assumptions. Vonda McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson got at this in their introduction to Aurora: Beyond Equality, in which they refer to the story (not by name).

I'll put what they say behind the jump, because to get the full effect on a first reading, "The Queen Bee" really needs to be encountered with as little knowledge of its plot as possible.

Periodic Table of Women in SF Meme

It's Friday -- time for a fun internet game!

By now you might have heard of the marvelous Periodic Table of Women in SF [that's science fiction/fantasy, not San Francisco, and you really should watch the video at the bottom of the post that that link brings you to].  A new meme has broken out about it, one I learned about from Cheryl Morgan:

Bold the women by whom you own books (I’m assuming this includes books or magazines edited by people who are not fiction writers).

Italicize those by whom you’ve read something (short stories count)

*Star those you don’t recognize [note: I've encountered so many names in my life, I always feel like I recognize most.  The ones I've starred are ones that, if somebody mentioned them in conversation, would cause a profoundly vague expression to come over my face.  And I'm doing this quickly, so I hope I don't star anybody who I not only recognize, but have spent actual time with...]

And below the jump, you'll find my answers...

Susan B. Anthony, Abortion, and Sarah Palin

Ann Gordon and Lynn Sheer respond to Sarah Palin and the Susan B. Anthony List's fabrication of history:

For nearly 30 years, both of us have been immersed in Susan B. Anthony's words -- Ann as the editor of Anthony's papers, Lynn as the author of a biography. We have read every single word that this very voluble -- and endlessly political -- woman left behind. Our conclusion: Anthony spent no time on the politics of abortion. It was of no interest to her, despite living in a society (and a family) where women aborted unwanted pregnancies.

The [Susan B. Anthony] List's mission statement proclaims, "Although [Anthony] is known for helping women win the right to vote, it is often untold in history that she and most early feminists were strongly pro-life." There's a good reason it's "untold:" historians and good journalists rely on evidence. Of which there is none.

via Ta-Nehisi Coates

Alice Munro and the Case of the Chekhovian Dames

[update: for some reason I originally attributed the New Republic article discussed below to Ruth Gordon rather than Ruth Franklin.]

I adore (adore, I tell you!) the stories of Alice Munro, as anybody who's looked at my bookshelves can attest, and I adore (adore, I tell you again!) the stories of Anton Chekhov, who actually takes up considerably more space on my shelves, but that's just because he wrote hundreds of stories, a bunch of plays, and all in Russian, which means, of course, that I absolutely must own every possible translation just to be able to compare.

Anyway, I discovered (via Scott) that  Ruth Gordon Franklin over at The New Republic has claimed that Munro just writes about women and Chekhov didn't do this and why won't this Munro woman explain herself, eh?  Writing primarily about men is just fine, everybody does that, no need to comment, but writing primarily about women is ... "not necessarily a flaw".  It would be understandable if she were a lesbian, of course, because what else do they know, and anyway those Canadians are ... weird...  And Chekhov, by the way, was neither a Canadian nor a lesbian, though he was a little bit weird, but he was also Russian, and we know what they're like from James Bond movies, so it all makes sense.

Sorry, I'm being deeply unfair in reductio-ing Gordon's ad for absurdum.  There are lots of things I could say about Gordon's premises about gender and writing, about characters and writers, about seeing what you want to see, or about Chekhov's complicated attitudes toward and relationships with women, but I'm really only in the mood to be facetious.  I haven't read any of Munro's or Chekhov's stories for a little while now, so I'm going to go back to them.  Maybe I'll start with this book:

Manohla Dargis on Women in Hollywood

Manohla Dargis may be my favorite mainstream film reviewer -- it's not just that she's got great perception of cinema as an artform of its own (too many reviewers treat movies like they're illustrated novels), but she's also an extraordinarily talented writer, one of the few film reviewers I'm happy to read simply for her sense of language and prose structure within the newspaper review form. Plenty of writers' expressive abilities have been deadened by the demands of writing multiple 800-1000-word reviews week after week, but Dargis still turns in more energetic and thoughtful reviews than not, and it's an impressive feat.

In a recent issue of the Times, Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood. The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking:

Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had “Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama) and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had “Amelia” (Mira Nair), “Post Grad” (Vicky Jenson) and “Whip It” (Drew Barrymore). Anne Fletcher directed “The Proposal” for Disney, while the studio’s once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released “An Education” (Ms. Scherfig), “Coco Before Chanel” (Anne Fontaine) and “Sugar” (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures has Nancy Meyers’s “It’s Complicated”; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.

The Jezebel website has now published an interesting interview with Dargis about the essay and about the relationship between women and Hollywood. Her replies to the questions are sharp, succinct, and peppered with the wonderful vernacular vocabulary the Times never lets her use...

The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like [Kathryn Bigelow's] The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

Jury, Meet Peers

Lizzie Skurnick:

"I just want to say," I said as the meeting closed, "that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it's disgusting." (I wasn't built for the board room.) "But we can't be doing it because we're sexist," an estimable colleague replied huffily. "After all, we're both men and women here."

But that's the problem with sexism. It doesn't happen because people -- male or female -- think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man's wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he'd be a better manager. It's not that women shouldn't be up for the big awards. It's just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don't know . . . deserve them.

(Be sure to read the whole essay; it's a smart and sharp attack on a problem that we should be past at this point.)

The good people at Publisher's Weekly are probably speaking what they think is the truth when they say, about their all-male list of 10 "best" books of the year, that "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz." I believe them when they say, "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

But being disturbed is not enough. What they have done is shameful.

This is not just some blogger's list of favorite books of the year. This is the publishing industry's trade journal telling the world what ten books from 2009 deserve most acclaim and attention. This list will affect how books are stocked in stores and it will affect what books are bought by libraries. The fact that the list only includes male writers contributes to a problem.

The editors who created this list have chosen to perpetuate sexism. They have deliberately and knowingly made it easier for male writers to have access to sales and publicity at the expense of women writers. Their list perpetuates the idea that the best, most serious, and most consequential books are written by men, and that idea will continue to have an effect out in the world.

Our society has made plenty of great strides over the past centuries and decades in terms of reducing institutional sexism, but moments such as this highlight just how entrenched the patriarchy is. Yes, patriarchy. Male dominated, male identified, male centered. It's insidious, and it is self perpetuating.

There is no objective, essential "best". There is stuff we like and stuff we don't -- texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as "great". Perceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other broad social categories mix with our experiences as readers, our educations, etc., to produce the judgments we make. Though we may struggle to create vivid and convincing justifications for our judgments, there are still mysteries to any evaluation that strives for nuance. But even so, we can expand our awareness, question our gut instincts, analyze our justifications, wonder why we are doing what we do and saying what we say. To assume that we can simply "not pay attention" to some of the central forces structuring our perception of reality is naive. We might be powerless to change them, but we might also be in a position to avoid perpetuating them and adding strength to them. We don't have any choice about whether the society we're born into is racist, sexist, heterosexist, whatever. But we do have some choice about how we relate to that society, how we work within it, what we pay attention to, and how we choose to make our choices.

I'm not ranting from a position of innocence -- most of the writers I most deeply value are men (many of whom are white, middle class, born within the last 150 years, and not from the U.S.). I have some hunches for why this is, hunches related to early reading experiences, prejudices about language and its relationship to reality, etc. Personal taste and judgment are too complex to explain simply or conclusively. Individual readers are strange creatures, full of prejudices and whims and blind spots and allergies. Individually, I expect there are weird particulars other than race, class, and gender that affect our taste more profoundly, more forcefully than those social categories themselves (if those social categories could ever be isolated, which I am skeptical of anyway -- any discussion of them is provisional and strategic). But when we move beyond the individual, as lists try to do, we're moving into the realm of systems and social structures -- means of distribution and consumption, gravitational forces that shape and warp how we talk about the realities we perceive, the tides we choose to sail with or against. And that talk itself then goes on to shape some more realities and turn some tides.

All of which is just me noodling around and trying to say the same basic thing: An institution with the power of Publisher's Weekly has more responsibility than an individual has, because the power that institution wields is greater than the power of most individuals (certain folks like Oprah excepted, although I can imagine people could argue that "Oprah" should be considered more of an institution than an individual).

Or, more basically, what I said above: The editors at Publisher's Weekly should be more than disturbed. They should be ashamed.

Here's a book to add to a best of the year list: A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter. I've got plenty of quibbles with the book, especially Showalter's dismissive attitude toward Gertrude Stein, but I'm also finding it (still reading; it's big) a rich source of information and delight. I've already begun seeking out writers I hadn't heard of until reading Showalter, and revisiting ones I had not paid enough attention to. Check out Katha Pollitt's review of Showalter at Slate or Rebecca Hussey's at The Quarterly Conversation or Sarah Churchwell's at The Guardian or Susan Salter Reynolds's at The L.A. Times.

Or watch Sarah Nelson, former editor-in-chief of Publisher's Weekly, interview Showalter.

I haven't read nearly as many books published this year as the editors at PW have, but I'm perfectly happy to propose A Jury of Her Peers as the best book of the year on a single criterion: It's the book we, the litterateurs and taste proclaimers, seem to need the most.