Mar
12
Subtlety is maddening.
Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment
Katha Pollitt puts into words my frustrations with the (book) world in a way I haven’t managed yet with her review of Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers. I need to smirk for a moment that the New York Times recruited a self identified feminist to review it who then subsequently dismissed it as something for the age of “bellbottoms” and “conscious-raising” for using such tired words as patriarchy.
Showalter sees women’s writing as a story of progress toward self-definition: from feminine (imitation of prevailing modes) to feminist (protest) to female (self-discovery), and, finally, free. “American women writers in the twenty-first century can take on any subject they want, in any form they choose.” We have indeed come a long way, but I’m not so sure we’ve reached nirvana yet. The marketplace, with its many gendered strictures and codes, has not disappeared. Thus, it matters that girls and women will buy fiction by and about both sexes, but boys and men—the relative few who buy fiction at all—stick to their own gender. (There was a reason that J.K. Rowling used her initials instead of her name, and that her student magician hero was not Harriet Potter.) It matters that the Great American Novel for which critics are always hunting is imagined as a modern Moby-Dick, not The House of Mirth. It means there’s a certain kind of critical receptivity, a hope of greatness for certain kinds of books by men that hardly ever comes into play with books by women, no matter how wonderful they are. Moreover, in literature as in life, men have much more license to display their whole unlovely selves and be admired for it, as the career of Norman Mailer shows.
Many women writers have complained that fiction by women is undervalued because we undervalue the domestic and the personal as opposed to big manly subjects like war and whaling. It’s an important point, but I think there’s something deeper going on. In fact, there are men who write about intimate life and women who take on big public subjects. More different than the books themselves is the gendered framing of how we read them. Nobody says Henry James is a less ambitious writer because he wrote The Portrait of a Lady and not The Portrait of a Sea Captain. If The Corrections had been written by Janet Franzen, would it have been seen not as a bid for the Great American Novel trophy, but as a very good domestic novel with some futuristic flourishes that didn’t quite come off? If the most prolific serious American writer was John Carroll Oates, would critics be so disturbed by the violence in his fiction? Perhaps we emphasize different elements in similar books and only notice the evidence that confirms our gender biases—and give men more benefits of more doubts, too. Gertrude Stein is a difficult and frustrating writer, but so is the Ezra Pound of The Cantos and the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and nobody serious calls them (as Showalter does Stein) basically frauds.
Try it yourself with the novels and poems on your bookshelf. Jane Updike? John Smiley? And while you’re at it, picture a literary America in which women were not just the major purchasers and readers of imaginative writing but also controlled the world of reviewing, prizes, awards, fellowships, relevant academic jobs, important panels, readings, international festivals, and those infernal best-book-of-the-year/decade/century lists. That this would be a highly speculative exercise suggests that Showalter is a bit overoptimistic. Women writers have come a very long way since Anne Bradstreet, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary Austin, but the jury of their peers has yet to be empaneled.
For those who don’t know, Norman Mailer (man, masculine, strong, innovative, thinker, honest) nearly murdered his wife at a party by stabbing her. I have heard his works are towering displays of misogyny, just what’s wrong with women but you know, he’s one of literature’s greats. I’d like to see Valerie Solanas (woman, feminine, crazy, emotional, pmsing, psychotic, man hater) honored in the same fashion! It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we’re taught to think and the subtle shadings that occur based on all the different social cues we pick up. I just wish I had the words to describe it.
As for the book I’m reading now, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty I barely have the words to describe that either. I just feel like I need to hand every single person a copy and say READ IT, because I can’t even begin to ponder how to contain all of the important things in a single blog post. (Perhaps this is one of my biggest problems with writing. Who knows.) Yeah, “lazy black welfare queens” my ASS! They work(ed) harder than any of us so the next time you want to parrot that myth, STFU, sit back and really think if you have any sort of clue or just picked that up in our racist/sexist cultural milieu by OSMOSIS. (And oh my goodness, I guess the new one in vogue is the lazy Mexicans. Yeah, out picking crops you wouldn’t ever deign to touch for cents a day. MMMHMMM. Gotta love the fucked up mythologies we create so we can be ok with the way both we as a society and we as individuals subjugate people.)
Sep
3
Preliminary thoughts on Shock Doctrine
Filed Under Books | Leave a Comment
I started Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. She begins with a brief history of torture and how research funded by the US in the 50s and 60s has been put into practice. Let me just say, that seeing the pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib and having read that portion of the book puts it into a whole new terrifying perspective. The idea they tried to sell us that this was just a few bad apples having their “fun” was laughable anyway, but this seals it. State sanctioned torture. Sickeningly enough they don’t even need to lie anymore. It is well known that we are still doing these things to “terrorists” (No proof needed – classification of “enemy combatant” can be bestowed at any time to anyone.) in Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons around the world.
Family values, morals, FREEDOM and democracy – aren’t they beautiful? But I guess this is the “liberal” (According to Republicans anyway, I think I must be far past liberal at this point.) way – It’s so weak and girly to give a shit about things like the human rights of people.
Have I mentioned that I completely envy/admire/love/idolize/want to be Naomi Klein? As much as I hate to “reduce” her to the level of celebrity crush or something.
Jan
29
This entry has been edited to death over the past few weeks, so I figure at this point I’m going to just post it and be damned.
I’ve been making an effort to broaden my reading in terms of feminism, and I’m trying to introduce a steady stream of works by women of color. I started with Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism by bell hooks. I feel like the book has planted a seed. Some of the things she wrote about have given me pause to stop and think, but it has been difficult to absorb it all. I think I’m going to have to go back and reread some parts to really do it justice.
I’m sad to say that because I didn’t jot things down during the moments of saying “that’s so incredible!!!” this review may be a little dry. I am having trouble remembering some of the specific things that really clicked for me, so this is basically just summarizing some of what she addresses. (And I’ve learned from my mistake as I’ve been jotting things down every time I read something amazing in my current book.)
The book discusses the the black “matriarch,” that black women are strong, domineering, and in control of their families. The idea is that this supposed position that they hold emasculates black men and makes the traditional nuclear family structure impossible in the black community. This seems to be a pretty common assertion in the media and I had embraced unquestioningly, having never stopped to think about the truth of the matter or just how racist and misogynist it is. hooks debunks the idea of the matriarch and demonstrates how white patriarchal concepts of masculinity are projected onto black men. At the same time, I was really kind of floored at the way perceptions can take root when you don’t have a clue. While rationally I can see what she is saying, I kept thinking but it’s true!!! I think she also did a great job of tying in how black women were treated and conceptualized during slavery and how those attitudes have persisted.
hooks also points out the drastic ways that black women’s experiences have differed from white women’s. For instance, while white feminists were working to liberate women and felt the key to this was integration into the workforce, they were neglecting the fact that black women had been working outside the home for decades. Through this, she illustrates that the feminist movement did not take women of color into account at all, but rather only built on and considered the experiences of white middle to upper class women.
She writes of the racism of the white suffragists and the misogyny of the male leaders of the civil rights movement. Reading some of those things was pretty cringe inducing. Not only did the suffragists express racist ideas, but also they actively kept women of color feminists from participating in the movement. Hell, I don’t remember if she speculated or if this was fact but the white suffragists didn’t want the vote for all women, they were just miffed that black men, former slaves got it before them (by law, anyway). And while they were reacting to the idea that their place in the hierarchy was upset, black men in the civil rights movement were trying to push black women into white patriarchy’s ideal of woman-hood in an effort to claim some semblance of power.
I really like the way she discusses language – that when scholars are talking of “women” and “blacks” they are typically talking about white women and black men. So when people like, say, Betty Friedan spoke of “women” in the Feminine Mystique she was speaking for all women when only white women were facing the problems she describes. This writes out women of color who did not have those experiences and allows us to ignore the issues they face. From what I gather, this has been one of the major failures of the feminist movement.
It seems to me that this is one of the more basic books on women of color and feminism, in that it makes a good entry point. Despite that, it does make things considerably more complex and I know that I’d probably benefit from both rereading it and reading related texts.
flickr
