Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

full disclosure: male suggestion that women who are direct & open about their interests (not coy prizes to be captured) are "desperate" always raises my hackles

I didn't realize it at the time but I chose to hew completely to non-cannon female authors in my early teens, putting that qualification ahead of prose style, and never read the "mid-century misogynists" (ty ty that is perfect) at all. Later when I tried Updike in college I did explicitly start avoiding all those male novelists because being exposed to that world and having it be valorized or even just validated by being written about...it was poisonous to me. It was bad for my mental and emotional health. It's hard enough to live in the world without having it reshaped for you into something inimical to your survival.

These books taught me a lot about what it must be like to be a young man, and gave me some terrible ideas about the kind of woman I didn’t want to be, in order to not be thought dull or needy by the intelligent, masturbating young men I liked, but they did not help me understand my life.

i just read i love dick last month, it was great

But his early books — I’m just the worst reader of them. They’re the only books where my gender and social life had felt involved in my capacity to read them.

The idea that having a personal stake apart from critical faculties makes you a bad or flawed reader is...interesting.

As a lit major I was taught that self-identification with art was a suspect move for a critic to make

Of course you were. Just like everyone coming out of j-school has been taught that "unbiased journalism" is really really important (or even possible).

ppl don't realise they're self-identifying with art most of the time, do they? i mean, once we've become aware that it's a suspect move we start pretending to ourselves that we're not doing it.

i really don't mean "most of the time" or "people" here, i mean "a rareified set of folx who consider themselves in alignment with critics even when they're not paid critics"

i.e. me

to have a point of view isn't to be a "bad reader", i don't think, even if that point of view causes one to reject certain texts. then again, her choice of words is probably just casual self effacement.

So I mean when you are a young adult reading young adult novels it is 100% ok to be like "you are SUCH a felicity" but when you are reading Grown Adult Novels it seems passé to be attempting to find yourself in them.

xxxxp Yeah! Also, as in everything else, the values that are considered neutral are always going to be those of the most powerful/present factions, so really everyone in alignment w that constructed "neutrality" actually IS identifying w it by not being critical of it in the first place.

i never saw myself represented in those books at all, which did tend to make them really boring

don't really know why you'd read the endless brilliant novels with their insight about life and not occasionally find comfort in relating to them.

it's hardly like you have a choice to either buy a t-shirt with the author's face on it or else analyse the book as a piece of work.

Well maybe you want to become a Seriously Literary Critic

i still think it's prob impossible to switch off your ability to self-identify. as c sharp major sort of says upthread.

I admit, when casually asked about something that I have an ideological critique of, if I know the questioner is sympathetic to that critique I'll just go in, but if I don't want to get into it for whatever reason, I will say, "I may be the wrong person to ask" or something like that. But it feels important to me that it's not calling MYSELF bad, it's just saying, "You might not like my answer."

i never saw myself represented in those books at all, which did tend to make them really boring

i just mentally associated myself with a series of bright and brittle young english literary men despite the yawning knowledge that i was not in fact going to grow up to become one.

i still think it's prob impossible to switch off your ability to self-identify. as c sharp major sort of says upthread.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:13 AM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark

For sure

That's why it's suspect to think identification is suspect

:)

suspect and just like, sad. maybe some super-pro critics do this, i guess the more you process a given form of art the less likely it is to have deep personal resonance, but i read quite a bit and i can't imagine this ever happening. hope it doesn't.

i tend to relate to observations about the world or whatever more than specific characters - i didn't think these were all dependent on me being a man but that's not for me to say i guess. still... i dunno, lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical, like you can self-identify with the general truth of a book and not necessarily specific characters or who they are.

still... i dunno, lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical, like you can self-identify with the general truth of a book and not necessarily specific characters or who they are.

Funny you should say that because one of the big proponents of the no-self-identification angle was Nabokov

Who preferred his books to be puzzles

And once published a book of chess problems paired with poems

i just mentally associated myself with a series of bright and brittle young english literary men despite the yawning knowledge that i was not in fact going to grow up to become one.

Full disclosure: I had an active imaginary life as a child, which for some time took the form of spin-off Star Wars adventures in which I had to insert myself as a new character because the only woman was Leia and she was terrible and I refused to even imagine myself as one of the men.

lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical

And again, it gets considered "neutral" because it reflects the status quo. I'm not even going to start on how self-consciously that whole body of writing is wrapping itself IN that supposed neutrality on purpose, because that kind of critique isn't my strength, but it's very apparent to me.

some xposts
wellll identification can be overplayed as an appeal -- i mean, everyone can see the possible reductio ad absurdam where one cannot read a book unless it is about a person so similar to them in experiences and attitude that it is like some kind of outsourced diary and there is no empathic leap to be made. (in fact i read recently a review of a rainbow rowell book where the reviewer was spent the whole time talking about how the character was Just Like Her, like down to college experiences, and I thought: well! as i am unlike you in many respects and find this review frankly dull there clearly will be nothing for me in this book! good day to you ma'am, i said good day.)

For me a great deal of the appeal of novels at all is that empathic leap that a person has to make, maybe even a sense of human universality if i'm being a hippy about it. But... when the majority of your novels are about the same kind of self-absorbed wanking white dude, this mediocre man who has overstretched himself in the service of a selfish ambition, then you're still not making any sort of empathic leap, you're just watching latest fleshing out of a particularly well-trodden archetype that we happen to have mistaken for the norm.

^^^

i suppose sometimes it's the fact the book articulates things you believe but hadn't formulated properly. or makes you realise things you hadn't noticed. i mean that's prob my personal buzz when reading, where the book gives you a bigger understanding of the world or makes you feel like someone has asked questions you have asked, or has better answers than you.

i guess i don't really see the characters as the thing to relate to, i'm more likely to identify with the author's vision of things or the way their world is depicted. most of my favourite books are prob novels of ideas though, i can't remember ever relating strongly to a specific character in a book.

xpost and I'm repeating things mostly already said!

not sure id go along with a strict dichotomy between identification and neutrality. obv "neutrality" is a term no one should use seriously anymore, but id say the same about "identification." isn't that always a constantly shifting, even elusive, thing to begin with?

I think reading has to involve some amount of exposure or vulnerability to something that's not the same as identification--even to texts you may find repugnant. that's the valuable part of the critical tradition, that insistence on something other than identification, that is worth holding on to. if all we have is identification then we're trapped in those hegemonic totalities we want to critique.

on the whole i don't like to treat literary characters as real people who can be thought about outside the words that contain them, which is an offshoot of that neutral POV ideal i guess

yeah i agree with that.

on the other hand since i don't have to engage in criticism for work or study i feel this awesome freedom not to formulate a "position" on any piece of art i engage with

that too. YAY

Well when I said identification I never said it had to be identification with the characters

Like when people 'identify' with a Cormac McCarthy novel half the time they just love that rugged intense individualistic violent prose

Often for me what I relate to isn't the character entire but is... a certain way of framing a problem that they have, in the moment.

e.g. i went on a tear of reading novels with unreasonable female protagonists and i didn't see myself in them (i don't know if you know this, my ilx friends, but i am eminently reasonable at all times) but had funny moments of recognition at situations and reactions and tiny half-voiced thoughts.

and I think often when people "identify with" a character they may well be, in their lived behaviour, nothing like that character - they just find something fine and admirable in the archetype and would fit themselves to it.

yeah i didn't mean to imply characters were the only space for identification. in a lot of writers the authorial voice becomes a kind of character even if it's indirect.

i guess the more you process a given form of art the less likely it is to have deep personal resonance, but i read quite a bit and i can't imagine this ever happening. hope it doesn't.

^^ This.

And, way xp -- I'm trying to think of an author I felt altered my ideas about sexual politics in the way those women are describing... and I've read my share of 'mid-century misogynists,' haha. I do remember backing off of Milan Kundera after reading several of his books in a row. Sure, his men are caricatures, to some extent, but seeing women through their eyes still made me feel icky. My guess is that it has a lot to do with the life stage you're in when you encounter them. If read early (before sexual exploration), or later (once you're comfortable in your own skin), they lose their power to shape or disturb.

For me a great deal of the appeal of novels at all is that empathic leap that a person has to make, maybe even a sense of human universality if i'm being a hippy about it. But... when the majority of your novels are about the same kind of self-absorbed wanking white dude, this mediocre man who has overstretched himself in the service of a selfish ambition, then you're still not making any sort of empathic leap, you're just watching latest fleshing out of a particularly well-trodden archetype that we happen to have mistaken for the norm.

― thighs without a face (c sharp major), Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait what novels are we even talking about that are all like this? is everyone just talking about updike and i guess maybe some richard ford?

i eventually read a whole bunch of mid-century suburban set novels and short stories and it was pretty amazing to put them all together because a) it really _isn't_ anyone's version of literature anymore, to the extent (dubious) it ever was, and b) it was this sort of great window into another time and set of values -- the way people thought and acted.

so you might read something and say 'it doesn't speak to me' but that doesn't preclude 'wow, this is really interesting how some group of people apparently actually see the world and their place within it'. which is what i appreciated from the excerpt -- this recognition that if the people you wanted to engage with read a certain set of stuff, and self-conceptualized that way, then maybe by reading that stuff you would understand those people. so the 'problem' (if it is one -- don't necc. wanna judge here) is not in the book, but in the fact that it is good at actually reflecting a certain worldview, and now you've gone and decided that people with that worldview are the people you want to engage with, so maybe you should change how you act to navigate that, and maybe it isn't a problem in the small, or its the only thing you can do in the small (because you don't necessarily get to choose everyone you engage with, or every characteristic about them), but it just reflects a broader issue in society in the large. and maybe the book isn't reinforcing that issue, or is only modestly so, compared to how its letting us externalize these archetypes so we can all discuss and think about them, and then maybe, because we _do_ have common reference points to who a 'brenda' is or w/e, then we can have a better conversation about rejecting them.

i mean that said, i enjoyed the sportswriter, but independence day was incredibly tiresome, cheever is p. great, but sloan wilson is a total bore, etc. so this isn't a blanket endorsement, like you can still be a dull writer about dull uninteresting stuff.

And again, it gets considered "neutral" because it reflects the status quo. I'm not even going to start on how self-consciously that whole body of writing is wrapping itself IN that supposed neutrality on purpose, because that kind of critique isn't my strength, but it's very apparent to me.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:23 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is also an interesting point. because the writing itself makes the move for 'neutrality' in a deliberate way, and this is an important and sometimes powerful authorial gambit. its what makes madame bovary tick, for example! Don't forget the subtitle, as ironically dispassionate as it gets: Provincial Life. (give or take the nuances of translation).

the novelists i think we're talking about are all i think similarly interested in questions of authorial voice and legitimacy, and they adopt different tactics and ironize them -- this is a key modernist move as a whole, and the later crowd are working in the shadow of and directly against naturalism as a tradition, and for that reason actually probably more celebratory of subjectiveness. the first rabbit (which is really good!) is like a study in how to write in the third person while inhabiting a single point of view intensely, and also how to undermine that point of view at the same time.

fpd spacecadet for 'eminently reasonable' otherwise good talks everyone imo

the novelists i think we're talking about are all i think similarly interested in questions of authorial voice and legitimacy, and they adopt different tactics and ironize them

You know how annoying it is when white people try to ironize racism? No, but seriously...When someone who is, for the purposes of this convo, white, male, and has academic or intellectual privilege and access to publishing and critical acceptance, and they use it to write about neurotic, underachieving young white men who are over-impressed w their own potential and the whole book is about their inner experience and pain, even when the auth is purposefully skewering some part of that on some level, and then A WHOLE SCHOOL OF WRITING COMES OUT OF IT where for a while all the "smart" books that serious ppl read and talk about are the same, it becomes indistinguishable from mirroring reality. At some point it's just the woodwork, it's the water we're all swimming in.

I would even argue that the amt of skewering that the author is really able to do is debatable, centered as they are within the exact thing they're trying to dissect.

Also, writers are in competition w each other, or at least in a dialogue w each other, or with "culture," and trying to achieve ever-increasing subtleties in their ironization, putting finer and finer points on their jokes or observations...until being "ironic" itself is the proof of skill? Seriously, I know we love that shit around here but when done without heart this is the ultimate in tedium.

Or, sorry, that was hyperbolic...even when there is "heart" or...if that level of earnestness is too much, even when there is "understanding" that's supposed to represent shared emotion...it's just sailing too close to the wind for me, I guess. I lose interest a long time before the joke turns on its final point.

A complicated subject because only in the last ten years have I reckoned with what my neutrality meant. For many years I read fiction and poetry with the expectation that I would never experience a connection with the material. I'd empathize with characters and scenarios and study the prose rhythms and mimic them in my own work but that's it. When I told a friend I was reading George Eliot and h/she would say "Ugh, no, I can't relate," I'd recoil. I'd think "What does that have to do with anything? Can't you use your imagination and enter this complicated mid 19th century rural world?"

When I accepted my sexuality I realized these responses were in part stunted. For some novels and poems my neutrality stemmed from my inability to point at a heterosexual romance and "relate" to it. To some extent I still do it and as some of you know I'm still loath to consider intentions as a valid way to judge work but I'm aware. For a gay Hispanic man in his thirties the act of reading demands a constant negotiation among contrary impulses, animal curiosity about the way literature is assembled, and awareness of privilege. I still got a lot to learn.

That's a great post!

thanks!

cosine

About halfway through The V(erificationist -Ed). and I'm trying to give it a fair shake but I'm increasingly irritated by the whole incestuous circle of academics attacking each other and/or each other's work and sleeping with each other/'s wives and over-sensitive middle-aged men having crises of wondering where it all went wrong with their marriages and looking for consolation from rosy-cheeked young women or just women who represent something without being PEOPLE and ARRGH. This is overcoming any appeal the writing or ideas might have had, although in the beginning I was still amused enough to keep going. Am I just inordinately bothered or is there a rawther large body of work that uses this setting/premise and WHY?!?

I remember now that the same issue that nagged me about White Noise although a) it was warmer and less, erm, self-consumed? and b) Ben assures me that it was ground-breaking, basically the first of its kind and should get a bye for originality plus the writing is genius. He may be right but I think I'll pass on anything further in this vein.

― Laurel, Tuesday, October 4, 2005 10:27 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

loooooooooool

Evidence that I really only have about three posts that I write, in different ways, over and over.

You know how annoying it is when white people try to ironize racism? No, but seriously...When someone who is, for the purposes of this convo, white, male, and has academic or intellectual privilege and access to publishing and critical acceptance, and they use it to write about neurotic, underachieving young white men who are over-impressed w their own potential and the whole book is about their inner experience and pain, even when the auth is purposefully skewering some part of that on some level, and then A WHOLE SCHOOL OF WRITING COMES OUT OF IT where for a while all the "smart" books that serious ppl read and talk about are the same, it becomes indistinguishable from mirroring reality. At some point it's just the woodwork, it's the water we're all swimming in.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Thursday, December 5, 2013 10:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think we're talking about totally different authors?

i'm not gonna go to bat for the baker who i haven't read, and i mean white noise has lots of limitations as a campus novel (even if a clever one) but you could apply 90% of those limitations and then some to like jane smiley--so i think its less race/gender and just that the subject matter takes _lots_ of work to make interesting because its been, as you note, so thoroguhly mined. but then you look at an ur-campus/young man novel like 'lucky jim' and its wickedly funny satire despite reflecting a v. sexist society. or maybe dubus who even when doing that sort of stuff (though he tackles middle-aged ppl) in like "we don't live here anymore" is really delicate and heartbreaking.

so its not like a celebration and then a skewering but at least in some cases a very sharp painful self-awareness (of ppl who you don't care about is the problem?).

like, it depends, and at a level of generality where we're not naming names and not talking about particular books and authors i don't know what to say.

i do want to rep for some updike and mailer for sure. The Executioner's Song is a stunning book. Just freaking magnificent. Among his faults, mailer was _not_ a one trick pony (tho you might think it from his early career).