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

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.

Women should name names so that you can go down the list and disprove them one by one? Uh no thanks, I'll pass. Roth and Updike take the blows in this excerpt but the real book release is next week and I'm very interested in the whole thing.

no not so i can disprove!

i suspect i might agree on e.g. baker.

i just think we're talking past eachother because you're thinking about certain writers and i'm thinking about others. and at this level of generality i think we're gonna disagree _more_ for that reason. the later updike i've looked at, apart from the bechs, has been pretty dull. but rabbit run really did something for me, etc.

if you want to have at richard ford's midlife crisis emoporn then i'm totally going to agree.

its just "white men write like _this_" doesn't seem a very useful, or even feasible proposition.

i avoided some of this stuff for years because i was convinced it would be dreary, and then i was surprised by how much was going on with it, and how much why it worked has not been part of almost _any_ critical discussion i'd encountered w/r/t it.

not that I've read many, if any of the authors being floated here (lol hardcore anti-"literature" stance since 1991) but s.clover, surely part of what you're seeing re: people not taking into account what you're seeing in some of these works is a necessary function of a difference in perspective between the semi-strawman of "white dudes talking about themselves" and what you would bring to your reading? just throwing that out there, no idea if it makes sense or not because like I said, I actively avoid the authors you all are currently discussing

I never read any Ford, actually! For me personally, this list is Salinger, DeLillo, M Amis, Updike, Roth, Atrim (ugh), Franzen, Chabon even though there are bits of Mysteries that I love. That's about all I tried to tackle, here and there, before I gave up and went back to genre fic by women. Academia can keep them.

Mysteries of Pittsburgh, one of the novels whose fascination with sexual fluidity made a considerable impact on me, is boneheaded about women.

i think it's unfair to characterize philip roth as writing about being a white man

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

― 乒乓, Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:20 AM (Yesterday)

nabokov definitely liked to toy with/upturn a lot of literary conventions, but i don't know if he was necessarily against self-identification. can you point me to an essay that argues this?

I'm not at all sure that all these writers were always thinking, I'm going to write about being a white man! I think to some extent they were just, or thought they were just, writing about being. But the same kinds of "truths" keep getting revealed and other people's truths are erased, over and over.

though the dude was opinionated, i'm sure he's said something himself xp

i'm just not convinced that the truths roth was revealing were the truths of being a white man bc i'm not sure what it means to say he's a white man. he was writing about what it means to aspire to whiteness (esp in American Pastoral) or to be firmly outside whiteness. He wasn't writing about whiteness the same way Updike was - who basically breathed the whiteness.

like i guess on some level you could reduce Human Stain to a book about being white, but it's also a book about not being white too - ditto Plot Against America, Communist, Shylock, Portnoy, etc

The Human Stain also concerns what whiteness means and its modes of behavior.

I myself heard it second hand from a professor but I believe that it came from the lectures he did at Cornell xo to k3v

Whoops -- too late

I honestly can't answer this bc my exposure to Roth is v superficial, but wasn't he writing a great deal about what it meant to be a man?

Doing a search for Nabokov and identification brings up a lot of snippets

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/21/nabokov-on-what-makes-a-good-reader/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/a-from-nabokov/

He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

I never read any Ford, actually! For me personally, this list is Salinger, DeLillo, M Amis, Updike, Roth, Atrim (ugh), Franzen, Chabon even though there are bits of Mysteries that I love. That's about all I tried to tackle, here and there, before I gave up and went back to genre fic by women. Academia can keep them.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Thursday, December 5, 2013 1:40 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see outside of roth i think yr pretty spot on here (unless you just mean super-early roth -- the article linked really made that a big distinction too)! i guess salinger is the prototype for this sort of stuff, and the one i've sometimes felt guilty i never really 'got'? & some early delillo i liked but i dunno if i'd still like it going back to it -- by the time he got into underworld mode i found him basically unreadable.

and i do think the rabbits fit yr description but at least in rabbit, run there's something fresh and astonishing in the prose that makes it work anyway.

djp -- i'm not arguing i identify w/ these authors, i don't. but i identify with the article, in that there was something about reading e.g. rabbit run, and feeling like it was a very precise description of aliens from another planet, and that this was something i appreciated.

see this is what I get for half-reading a thread that has veered into shit I've actively avoided but am semi fascinated by

in orbit -- yeah roth's early stuff is about young men, but its also very much about identity, and in the later stuff he really moved to a much broader span of concerns and ideas.

when young ppl write novels they aren't usually equipped to write about much more than their immediate experience, or at least they need to get that out of their system, if they can, before they can go new places. & i agree the cavalcade of identikit writers workshop bildungsromans can be wearying, and absolutely that its a v. male genre. but at least some authors can go to much more interesting places when they grow out of that, and ad least some things in that vein can be really good, at least when taken individually.

the thing with the earlier generation too is maybe they're better with time.

like if i was reading rabbit right after its publication (or cheever contemporaneously, etc), it maybe would have been a world i was more exposed to, even if vicariously, and so it wouldn't have been as interesting to me. but now its like a time machine.

I'm sort of past it now, or it's just not that relevant to my life anymore bc my engagement is mostly with like feminist and Black/intersectional feminist theory as it relates to social justice work, these days. But for a while, maybe around 6-8 years of my life and maybe bc it was That Moment and I worked in a bookstore with "serious" ppl, these were the novels you had to have read in order to talk about...anything. Or have influence. And years later, even when that moment was over, you still had to have an appreciation/critique of the same authors and their works in order to function at a high level in conversations with references, tossed off asides, joeks, etc--to just understand the feel of things.

I, like Dan, avoided the whole bolus but kind of floated around the edge where I could afford to roll my eyes but still had the option of trying to peer through the peephole via my friendships w ppl who were "in." But I always felt like my choice had been an anti-intellectual one or something...anyway, I want to read more about how this grouping of choices I made wasn't just me, I want to locate it in something more complex.

Basically it's good to see my experience reflected, even if it's 15 years later.

i love delillo but fuck the rest of them

Avoided all american authors

IYO who are the best Irish female authors

Maeve Binchy iirc

McCarthy

Many, many x-posts but isn't it possible to identify with a character in a novel, whilst also noticing yourself doing that, and noticing whatever biases it may be giving you as a reader? Although I think someone else upthread said it wasn't an either/or thing, identification, anyway.

Interesting to note how strongly some of us fall to either end of the pro/anti identification spectrum as readers

<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6253/the-art-of-fiction-no-221-ursula-k-le-guin";>"It’s funny, The Anxiety of Influence came out at just the time that women were discovering other women writers and saying, Hey, we have influences! We never did before! Here were all the men worrying about the anxiety of being influenced and the women were going, Whoopee!"</a>

the anxiety of bbcode

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/12/9/lena-chen-onlineharassment.html

good god, that's the most sickening thing i've read in quite a while

ugh
Is there any possibility of this sort of thing becoming "easily" fixable by Google or w/ever?

ugh i had to stop reading it
how scary

...

I mean, I have experienced only very mild internet stalking / hate mail / rapes threats etc compared to what those people have been through. But the sense of powerlessness and terror that it engenders is unfortunately all too familiar.

It's hard to imagine what it's like to be the focus of this kind of harassment if you've never been through it. It's even way, way harder to try and imagine the person - or persons, but it really seems like it's "one dude with a serious grudge and a lot of sock puppets" - who would be willing to keep up such a determined campaign for so long. (Though if it's a group, it's easier to imagine, as they reinforce one another's behaviour, like stalking and harassment is a kind of game that they win points with their friends for activities.) Not sure if this would go so far as to be a part of Predator Theory (which is the scariest and yet one of the most interesting branches of forensics) but the study (if not unmasking) of these kinds of offenders (and it's very clear that damage and offence has been done here, even if our current legal framework doesn't always recognise it) might be of more use towards stopping it?

I'm always reminded of that high profile case of violentacrz or whatever his name was, the unmasking of someone who was terrorising people - though not with the kind of *focus* in this case - and his apparent cluelessness as to how his behaviour was affecting people, combined with that hypocritical "Oh noes, don't out me, I have a job and family etc!" That on one level, articles like this don't stop the harassers because letting them know that they have beaten their opponent (as if in a game) makes them feel like they have accomplished their goal. But to get people like *Google* to accept that this is a problem, your services are facilitating violence, and you can't just throw your hands up and say "we're no more responsible than the phone company when someone prank calls someone!" Because the phone company is obligated to turn over records to the police if someone is using the phone as a weapon of intimidation, but Google just keep going "oh noes, privacy!" (Perhaps harassed people should pose as market research firms, and just *buy* the data, bet Google would roll over then.)

But the root problem here, with the google thing, is that same problem with all massive tech companies - when you are vastly over-dominated by young, techie, cis-het white men - i.e. exactly the demographic statistically *least* likely to BE affected by these issues, and *most* likely to be the CAUSE of these of these issues.

I've had the experience, unfortunately more than once, of being harassed or made super-uncomfortable by creepy guys with no sense of boundaries, through a web-based medium, contacting the moderator and asking "DO SOMETHING!" and having the dude turn around and say some unhelpful variant on "A few rape comments? What's the big deal? Just ignore it." It's impossible to tell whether ignoring/responding to someone online will produce a few zings, or a multi-year campaign of harassment. These are the conditions women learn to live with online.

It's the same as that change to Twitter's blocking policy last week. "Some guys get mad at getting blocked, and escalate? Oh, instead of dealing with those people, let's coddle them by tricking them into thinking they haven't been blocked." And women quite rightly responding: "we wanted more, not less protection. If you've got a situation where someone is standing outside your window shouting; before, at least, we had a thick curtain we could draw. Now you have turned that into a one-way mirror facing the wrong way. NO." It's hard for me to believe that anyone could think that this was a better solution, but having witnessed the groupthink that evolves around techie guys of the ~Silicon Valley demographic~ ("Why would you not want your real name and face on our website? What could possibly go wrong with that?") unfortunately I know they do.

Yeah, I do feel like Google could find a way to make this easily fixable. But until it becomes something which is regularly experienced by ~people like them~ instead of being *caused* by ~people like them~ what incentive do they have to make it easily and easily-accessibly fixable?

Also, wow, but this morning is becoming kind of a bummer, but I just wanted to leave this post somewhere. And I was going to leave it in the midst of one of the discussions on child-rape and paedophiles and wow, there are so many potential threads that I'm not sure if I should leave it on the R Kelly/Jim DeRo thread or the Ian Watkins thread or any of the so many other delightful "how do we talk about people who pursue sex with 13 year old girls?" threads we've had recently (because this shit is hard to read without getting triggered) and so, instead, I shall leave it here:

http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/TroubleAndStrifeReader_9781849662956/chapter-ba-9781849662956-chapter-0008.xml

This does require a content warning, because it does discuss child-rape but it also does produce a really nifty addressing and debunking of the usual "Cycle of Abuse" theory which gets trotted out every so often when talking about These Issues (and I counted at least one on the R Kelly thread).

But it was certainly eye-opening for me, because I have certainly trotted out "Cycle of Abuse" as an explanation or mitigation many times.

And now I am going to go and lookit pictures of flowers and kittens and sea arches for a bit.

that's a very good article and addresses something that hasn't changed since it was written, the way that media and professional othering of paedophiles tends to overshadow the vast majority of abuse taking place within family/social settings

NV, I thought quite hard about asking this, because I'm well aware that it'll open me to accusations of "humourless feminist" and worse from the peanut gallery. But.

Are you aware of the dissonance of posting to a Feminist Theory thread, while using a screen name which mocks an aspect of feminist theory - or is it deliberate?

i'm not sure i would describe the term "mansplain" as an aspect of feminist theory.

i thought about that to be honest but my take is that "mansplaining" has a certain mocking humour to it as a construction and the song i'm spoofing is pretty mansplainy in itself, i don't think the joke (such as it is) is at the expense of the idea

on the other hand sometimes a 48-hour passing whim of a display name does end up being off on some threads

i'm attributing more thought to it than was put in, really. at heart it's just a bad pun

Please be aware, I'm not even saying "don't do this" but more "are you at least aware of the dissonance involved here?"

yeah i think i was but see above

also just realised ledge did this better with "itt: 'splaining men"

That one is much more clear in the direction at whom mockery is being directed.

I'm sorry, and I did not mean to pick on you, NV. I am just in a Place Of Badness right now and prob need to go look at kittens and sea arches.

it's all good, got no wish to aggravate anybody's bad places

This does require a content warning, because it does discuss child-rape but it also does produce a really nifty addressing and debunking of the usual "Cycle of Abuse" theory which gets trotted out every so often when talking about These Issues (and I counted at least one on the R Kelly thread).

fwiw i hesitated before posting that on that thread b/c i was aware it might come off like an attempt to mitigate, which it was absolutely not intended as; it was more a huge thing that i hadn't seen brought up even tangentially (and still haven't). i was very inarticulate overall yesterday for many reasons though (couldn't even find the right phrasing to tweet it, so didn't)