Works Cited, remember the ladies edition

Look, I have a blog that's called Works Cited, so I'm going to have to just point out something that's been driving me nuts.

Rei Terada recently posted an insightful reflection on the aims and meaning of WikiLeaks, drawing on some easily available but little-read essays by Julian Assange. There are still zero comments on that blog post. My colleague Aaron Bady (or "Adrian," as Clay Shirky recently accidentally dubbed him in a Twitter shout-out) then wrote a post on WikiLeaks that I feel confident in saying would have been impossible without Terada's post. (Aaron explicitly links her post.)

Aaron's post has received 326 comments and counting and links from the likes of Jon Dresner and Clay Shirky. Granted, a large percentage of those comments come from internet armchair-policy-wonk blowhards, but that comes with the territory. While it makes sense that Aaron's post would initially attract more comments than Terada's--he has a wider readership and posts more regularly than she does--the stark disparity between the attention the two posts are getting strikes me as almost unbelievable. Three hundred and twenty-six versus zero. Without diminishing Aaron's post--it is smart, and bonus points for gratuitous Teddy Roosevelt--Terada's already contains the core insight that makes Aaron's post so interesting, i.e. that Wikileaks is less about revealing secrets for the sake of the specific information involved than about disrupting what Assange calls, with a capaciousness that powerfully reorients the way we understand legitimacy, "conspiracy."

Given these facts, it's hard not to see this as another episode of When A Woman Says It, Crickets; When A Man Says It (Later), Genius!!! There are certainly circumstantial reasons that Aaron's post would get more attention than Terada's, but there's no legitimate reason that her post would be ignored. Every professional woman has had this happen to her, and every time it happens, the ghost of Simone de Beauvoir weeps. Now, I'm sure Terada herself isn't even remotely fussed about this. What would she want with three hundred blowhards commenting on her blog? But whether or not any individual commenter or linker is thinking, "whose substantive post should I read and link, that of a dude or that of a lady? Oh who are we kidding definitely a dude!", the effect is the same: dude gets a signal boost and is credited with genius, lady disappears from the political conversation. Citation is partly about credit, and there's some credit due here.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

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UPDATE. I've seen the following objections raised to the above post, and while I probably oughtn't address this gender studies 101 stuff, well, I will -- briefly.

The objections:

1. There are factors besides gender that explain the popularity of Aaron's blog post.

Response: Yes, of course there are. My point (as I explicitly state above) is not that people who read or link to Aaron are making an active choice to ignore one of his sources on the grounds of gender, but rather that this pattern (as Meg brilliantly abbreviates it, WAWSIC;WAMSILG) is pervasive, and that this is objectively speaking an instance thereof. Voilà les crickets. Voilà the attention. This post first of all an attempt to draw more attention to the earlier and very worth-while post by Rei Terada. It is, second, a remark on the attention disparity, and on the broader pattern of failure to attend to what women say that is necessarily its context. This is a gender issue irrespective of whether any individual person is consciously or unconsciously deciding that women aren't worth listening to.

2. One quite often doesn't know the gender of a blogger, and 3. one of the first and most influential bloggers to link Aaron was Digby, a woman (2, 3).

Response: Since my argument was never "people are ignoring Rei Terada purely because she is a woman," these objections aren't quite on point. But it's worth observing that, since femininity is marked and masculinity is unmarked in present culture, the blogger of unknown gender, in the absence of stereotypical feminine markers, is usually (consciously or unconsciously) presumed masculine. Digby is actually the classic example of this. Digby rose to prominence as a left blogger under her pseudonym, and was for years almost universally presumed male, until she "came out" as female by accepting an award in person in 2007. She's understood as female now, but her reputation was made when she was "ungendered," which was received by default as male. Naturally you are enlightened and truly without gender bias in all that you do. But generally speaking the world isn't.

Fairies and Indians

I subscribe to Debbie Reese's RSS feed because she puts books on my radar that usually wouldn't otherwise get there. Her blog on the representation of Native Americans in children's literature is not a litcrit blog per se--it's closer to Sociological Images, except there's only one theme: obnoxious and harmful stereotypes about Native Americans.

This is the "strong ideology" model if you like, but it's a theme that bears repeating. Debbie's posts don't have the texture, twists, and turns of, say, Aaron's. But you see the necessity of what she does when time and again she rebuts comments by offended school librarians and authors. They're offended, of course, that Debbie was offended by their stereotyping of Native Americans.

Their first line of defense is of course authorial creativity. It's not books that grossly stereotype (homogenize, Orientalize, temporally displace, and kill off) Native Americans that are miseducating children; it's the terrible people who want to censor creativity. Do we not realize that this is art.

And as a corollary, It's just a book; it's not real.

Ought we forget that there are actual children involved--some of them nonwhite? And that when we depict certain people as "magical," we move them into the realm of the not-real as well?

Is it really a terrible abridgment of artistic license to insist that historically oppressed peoples are not toys for you to play with?



Today Debbie writes about a trope in the unreal-Indians vein:

This morning, I read an article in the Telegraph about the "Latitude Festival," an annual music festival that takes place in Suffolk, England. The first one was in 2006. The article in the Telegraph isn't about the music. Instead, Neil McCormick describes the people and setting. Here's what caught my eye:

People enter into the spirit with colourful costumes: there were parties of American Indians, Smurfs and an engaging posse of pensionable old dears dressed as fairies. The audience is, it has to be said, overwhelmingly white and middle-class (and probably predominantly middle-aged).

Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Reading those words reminded me of an email I received on December 30, 2007 in response to critiques I posted about one of Jan Brett's books. In her email, the author wrote:

Why is there always someone who wants to rain on someone else's parade? Why can't children just enjoy a good read? I am sure you don't believe in Santa, the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny because they are incorrect in guiding young children's beliefs.

For those that want to study the American Indian ways and beliefs, good for them. For now I will read and enjoy books, just because.

It struck me that she would cast American Indians in that particular framework---of things-not-real. She is a librarian in a public school in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Santa. The Tooth Fairy. The Easter Bunny.
Indians, Smurfs, and fairies.

Debbie's post caught my attention because the Indian-as-fairy trope has been something I've been thinking about, in a back-burner way, for a few years now. The Indian in the Cupboard and Disney's Pocahontas are two twentieth-century examples, but it's also powerfully present in the literature of the early 1800s, leading up to and following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1826), Mary Conant is an Episcopalian misfit among the Puritans, having a "fairy" nature better suited to old England (17). In an act of rebellion carefully staged to evoke British fairy myths, she walks into the woods to find a husband:

...taking a stick and
marking out a large circle on the margin of the stream, she stept into the magic ring, walked round three times with measured tread, then carefully retraced her steps backward, speaking all the while in a distinct but trembling voice. The following were the only words I could hear,

Whoever's to claim a husband's power,
Come to me in the moonlight hour.

And again,—

Whoe'er my bridegroom is to be,
Step in the circle after me.

She looked round anxiously as she completed the ceremony; and I almost echoed her involuntary shriek of terror, when I saw a young Indian spring forward into the centre. (23)

The mapping of Indian to fairy here is unmistakable; likewise, the ideology that fashions the Indian as destined to vanish (as the fairies are said to have vanished from England, inevitably, with the coming of modernity). Comparing Native Americans to Smurfs makes them not-real; comparing them to fairies makes them an anachronism, a move that can be and has been used to justify their brutal marginalization. And indeed, Hobomok eventually honorably disappears to make way for white modernity.

We're used to the figure of the Vanishing Indian in the U.S.; in parallel, some have hypothesized that the Vanishing Fairy in British folklore is actually based on an oppressed indigenous group, the Picts (I don't have the books on hand, but I believe that Diane Purkiss, for one, entertains this theory).

What's interesting is the way that images of Native Americans can be appropriated as symbols of national identity even while that nation founded itself in part on the violent oppression of said Native Americans. This, too, finds a parallel in fairy mythology, here courtesy of John Ruskin:

Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run,--no more—and that you could not change your abode; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would you do it? I hope not. I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold.

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can; and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the furnace as of the wood... (126-7)

Fairies, vanishing though they be, remain powerful signifiers of English identity. Ruskin argues that it is a tone to transform the English landscape through industry, yet there is a sense of resignation in his words. And perhaps Ruskin can be resigned because, he argues, in spite of everything, the fairies in England will persist. Even if England should lose its gardenlike character (which Ruskin hopes will not happen), England will remain English, hence populated by fairies. In a similar way, Native Americans (who, unlike fairies, are real) are appropriated as signifiers of Americanness even as their anachronism is enforced. And frequently, that enforcement arrives by way of children's literature, which is, don't you know, creative.

Interesting to whom?: A second response to Aaron Bady

Apropos of a conversation begun here, continued here, and continued further here.

...she is to conceive daughters as well as sons and sons as well as daughters

       --noted well-meaning poet Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric"

Aaron,

Happy Fourth, and thanks for your thoughtful reply. I can see how my earlier gloss (“Patriarchy hurts women. But that’s not the point. The point is, it hurts men.”) could be interpreted as scolding you for not writing about something entirely different. I agree that that would be an illegitimate critique, like unto a reviewer saying "okay, but why didn't you write an article on Tender Buttons instead?"* To clarify, I don't suggest that you need to write about the women in the films. What I am critiquing in your writing on these films is not the objects of inquiry but the critical position, which is one that takes for granted (and, I have been arguing, universalizes) a certain nostalgia for an all-cereal diet.

You have just very usefully elaborated on the position from which you write these posts, a position of thinking through masculinity. I find this illuminating, and, as I remarked earlier, I see that you never meant to claim transparent-eyeball status.

Yet as I wrote at the beginning of my post and in earlier comments, my objection is less to your reading than to a gesture that you have now made several times -- one that implicitly moves your argument into an impersonal theoretical register. You remarked that you symptomatically repeat the disclaimer that these films are misogynistic. I am identifying the compulsive refrain as a two-parter: "Yesyes, it's misogynistic, but that's not what's important here."

In fact, you make the same gesture in your most recent post:

To be clear — as I seem to symptomatically keep saying over and over again — these films are, in a few very important ways, very basically misogynist and I don’t mean to downplay that fact. But I think I have a good rationale for bracketing that off, at least temporarily: as with the fact that Jefferson owned slaves, the importance of the fact can sometimes mislead us into thinking that simply pointing it out accomplishes more than it does. I call this Sociological Images syndrome, the tendency to confuse pointing out a text as symptomatic of a naturalized systemic projection of power with neutralizing its power as such. Doing so can have real value, I agree — though I believe we’ve discussed this point before — but while I love Sociological Images (and I think I discovered that blog via you), they have a real tendency to identify and emphasize the misogyny of the images they dig up at the expense of reductively simplifying the constitutive complexity of those artifacts. Of course, they often have good reason for doing so; as a clearinghouse for found images and as a pedagogical resource, their commentary, it seems to me, is largely intended to provoke and to serve as a suggestion for how a discussion could begin. Saying “this image is misogynistic” is, in that context, a prelude to a much richer and deeper discussion that they, there, have the space or intention of having.

I, however, am after something slightly different. First of all, the problem with pointing out the misogyny of the Apatow movies is that it’s so obvious as to make pointing it out not particularly an interesting thing to do...

This is a methodological claim, one that sets up your approach as interesting and productive and any other approach as uninteresting and unproductive. Unexplored, because unasked, are the questions, Interesting to whom? Productive of what? Interesting and productive are evidently universals; you're not saying "I am interested in the forms of masculinity in this film because of my personal investment in XYZ." You're saying -- and I'm paraphrasing pretty closely here -- "We should not discuss this film's misogyny because that is not interesting." Period!

You've convinced me that any claim to objectivity is unintentional (indeed, you had already), but I am suggesting that this gesture, so formulated, always makes that claim, whether or not you use the (by now conventional) pronoun "I," or write it on a blog rather than in your dissertation.

To repeat my earlier post, "In a sense I'm criticizing you for doing a thing you never meant to do. But you keep seeming to mean to do it, and I think you should consider trying to put an end to that." Imagine my astonishment when you responded in part with "the problem with pointing out the misogyny of the Apatow movies is that it’s so obvious as to make pointing it out not particularly an interesting thing to do." You're still seeming to mean to do it.

The kicker is that very soon after this move, you acknowledge that I wasn't suggesting that you ought to reduce your argument to pointing out misogyny, nor indeed to reduce anything.

So why set up an argument that you know is straw and call it uninteresting, prior to proceeding to your truly deep analysis of Apatovian masculinities? Might one not go ahead and make an argument without first slaying the mother? (Second-wave feminism is, after all, the source of masculinity studies.)

Your androcentric approach, with its nostalgia for the man-cave, is, as you say, productive, insofar as it "constitute the texts as rich and interesting." It sounds like you have a situated rationale for exploring these versions of patriarchal masculinity, and that's great. To me, in contrast, these films are impoverished, not because it's the job of popular films to overthrow the patriarchy (hah) but because whatever permutations of masculinity it explores, it's always (as you've already observed) masculinity fully contained within and reinforcing of a heterosexist patriarchal framework, which makes it, to me as a feminist critic, The Same Old BS. All those multi-dudes, each oppressing women in their own way. I've seen it, and I've seen it, and I've seen it.

I don't suggest that you need to agree with me on that score, and I don't think I have ever suggested that you ought to be writing about something else. As evidenced by the complexity of your readings, to you these films are rich, interesting, and useful for thinking about masculinity, to which I say hurrah. Your reading is your reading; it's insightful; it's valid. But I wish you would not preface your readings with explicit refusals of the possibility that, for certain non-dude critics, the films' loving homages to various forms of patriarchal oppression might not be what's interesting.



*That's PURELY HYPOTHETICAL. Obviously.

A response to Aaron Bady

Apropos of a conversation here.

Aaron,

I think what I keep taking exception to (and I felt this way about your Double Indemnity post as well) is just this repeated methodological gesture: "Yesyes, it's misogynistic, but that's not what's important here."

I can understand why one would make this gesture as a kind of self-regulation, if one is explicitly guarding against one's own critical tendencies. In a sense I'm criticizing you for doing a thing you never meant to do. But you keep seeming to mean to do it, and I think you should consider trying to put an end to that.

Here 'tis: You tend not to represent these moves as self-regulation; instead they seem to stage interventions in someone else's reductive reading. It's staged not as self-regulation but as intellectual correction: "Here I am to tell you why your reading is simplistic."

The reason this doesn't sit well with me is not personal but positional. This self-regulation-posing-as-intervention seems to misrepresent a position of privilege as critical sophistication, even objectivity. Because the misogyny is not directed at you, you get to say that it's not the important thing about the movie, and this gets turned into a critical virtue.

As a feminist critic who never saw the man-child as a remotely viable alternative to father-knows-best (because they are equally misogynistic), I cannot and will not say that misogyny is not the important thing. These are not abstractions to me, and I do not think it would amount to better criticism to proceed as if they were.

You say that these positions are differently misogynistic, and that the difference is illuminating. You are right about that as far as it goes. I've been arguing that it nonetheless doesn't go very far, because, as you have readily pointed out, these internal dynamics of an oppressive system are not explored in a way that can even countenance, much less suggest a path toward, a genuine refusal of that system. I don't see where it gets us to applaud male directors for making visible contradictions that feminists -- and not just academic feminists -- articulated, raised consciousness about, and fought to ameliorate thirty years ago. It's like applauding Mark Twain for suggesting in Huckleberry Finn that there are some contradictions in slavery. (I certainly don't want to dismiss HF in general, but on political grounds it's distinctly too little, too late.)

I agree, of course, that "Judd Apatow is sexist, sexism Judd Apatow, -- that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know" would be an unenlightening reading. I also think the dream-work model of ideology is productive. Your ideas, as they say, are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter blog.* Where I'm getting caught up is the moment when it seems to translate into a criticism that wants to be both political and detached, where detachment appears to be enabled primarily by privilege. I'm not sure it's possible; I'm even less sure that it's desirable.

*(Actually, I already do.)