Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? [...] Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, 1929

Google Books Ngrams and the number of words for "snow"

As I mentioned yesterday, Google has put out a big data set (downloadable) and a handy interface for tracking the incidence of words and phrases. As many have pointed out, one can do a lot more with the raw data set than with the handy, handy online tool, but it's that latter that the New York Times called

a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.

(I've never heard of Angry Birds, but that's the kind of thing I'm likely to be out of the loop on, so okay.)

I said yesterday that Google Books Ngrams was a lot more sophisticated than Googlefight, and it is. But I'm troubled by the model of cheap history that's presented in the NYT article--as if to suggest that if you want to do cultural studies now, all you need to do is Google (Books Ngram) it:

With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The lines eventually cross paths about 1986.

You can also learn that Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe don’t get nearly as much attention in print as Jimmy Carter; compare the many more references in English than in Chinese to “Tiananmen Square” after 1989; or follow the ascent of “grilling” from the late 1990s until it outpaced “roasting” and “frying” in 2004.

“The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard.

I will concede that newspaper articles are necessarily glib, but it's easy to see how the fallacy that this article promotes would be broadly accepted. The first quoted paragraph above correlates the incidence of words with known historical events; the second moves on to suggest the ngrams' predictive capacity. There's a narrative implicit in each statement of "just the facts," only the assumptions that go into them are effaced.

Let's look at the first of these reports: "With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold."

The implicit narrative is that nobody even bothered to talk about women until second-wave feminism came along. In fact, if you go by the incidence of the words "men" and "women" in the Google Books Ngrams data set, sure, you might be tempted to really believe that the 1970s was the time "when feminism gained a foothold." I can imagine the suffragists who fought for and won the franchise that I as a woman can enjoy annually asking, "what are we, chopped liver?"

What distinguishes the feminist movements of the 1970s, for the purposes of this data set, is its renewed attention to language. The suffragists wanted a policy change: they wanted the vote (and the freedoms that the vote could give them). The second-wave feminists wanted policy changes too (still working on that wage gap, people!) but they also wanted a deeper change: they wanted to change the way we thought about women and--here's the kicker--spoke about women. The 1970s is when it became broadly recognized as problematic to treat "man" as a synonym for "person," and I suspect that a significant percentage of the uses of "men" were and remain the "universal" usage. That's a nuance that the online Ngrams tool can't give you ("with a click").

Likewise, if you got your understanding of history through Google Books Ngrams, you wouldn't expect to hear this from 1929:

Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper, I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex--woman, that is to say--also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. (27)

That's Virginia Woolf, of course, giving a fictionalized, subjective encounter with the British Library. Yes, it's a bit longer than a sentence, and you have to read it; you can't just click! But it gives you much more women's history than does the Google Books Ngrams example cited by the NYT.

Google Books Ngrams is a fun tool (as everyone keeps pointing out) and, if you download the data set, even a useful one. But it can only get you so far, and uncontextualized, it encourages assumptions that it does not announce. I mention the number of words for "snow" in my title above because it's a famous fallacy--the notion that Inuit has [insert high number here] words for snow, always with the implicit suggestion that having a lot of words for something means that something is extremely important to the culture. Language Log uses this as their go-to example of stupid assertions about language widely believed by the public; it's a cheap Whorfism, claiming broad cultural significance for something incidental. We have a widely accepted term for a magical being that flies by night and runs a clandestine cash-for-baby-teeth operation. That doesn't make it central to American culture. ("Mom, is the Tooth Fairy real?" "Yes! Check Google Books Ngrams if you don't believe me!")

There's a certain Words For Snowism in the online Google Books Ngrams tool, the suggestion that the more frequently a word is used, the more important it is in a collective unconscious of which the Google Books data set serves as a convenient index. This importance is not the same thing as significance, in the sense of significant digits or statistical significance; it's not the difference that makes a difference, but rather a psychologized importance--attachment, cathexis. Which is really kind of garbage.

The web interface is, as my friend Will says, a toy. For the serious scholar, there's much more to be done with ngrams, and one can be careful as well as lazy with the conclusions one draws. But the toy has a "boom! proven with statistics!" quality, a reality-effect that's enormously pleasurable, even, as Patricia Cohen writes for the NYT, "addictive." (That's the point of toys, isn't it?) That's why I'm inclined to agree with Jen Howard, who writes that her "skepticism is mostly directed at how people will use it and what kinds of conclusions they will jump to on dubious evidence." That sort of jumping is practically built into the ngrams tool.


Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Annot. and introd. Susan Gubar. 1929; Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. Print.

Previously on text-mining:
Dec. 16, 2010
Dec. 14, 2010
Google's automatic writing and the gendering of birds

School's back!

My summer of fellowship was completely awesome, don't get me wrong. I got loads done. But I still get that autumnal excitement when fall semester starts, even though Berkeley's fall semester marks the beginning of the hot season. It's not just the thrill of buying more binder clips (oh, the pleasures of graduate life), it's the feeling that the whole world is back in business.

Here's why this semester will be awesome:

-I'm going to get to work on my Williams chapter, which is about Paterson and auto-ethnography and, probably, Margaret Mead

-I'm teaching a new course, featuring some science studies greatest hits, and also Virginia Woolf

-I'm going to MSA in November

No doubt I will start whining once the grading hits (I know I scheduled a couple of painfully quick turnarounds in there), but just now I'm excited for things to begin.

Statistical Panic

Kathleen Woodward, Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.

Statistical Panic challenges the idea that the category of the emotions is altogether psychological, and therefore a refuge from the political. By constellating a variety of texts -- literary, critical, social -- Woodward interrogates the emotions as sites of political thought and political action. The emotions have, she argues, a "cognitive edge." I find this formulation less illuminating than an example she returns to over and over, the moment in A Room of One's Own (one of my favorites) in which the narrator, sitting in the British Library, finds herself doodling a caricature of a professor, realizes that she is angry, and then realizes that her anger is a defense against the professor's anger. Anger is, for the narrator, a diagnostic and then analytical tool. Woolf's narrator offers a model for Woodward's meditative readings of the emotions.

In the first section of the book, Woodward explores the ways that feelings like anger, shame, and compassion have been theorized to different ends, and what different narratives about the emotions mean politically. These are suggestive and politically aware chapters that particularly point up the emotions surrounding identity politics: "feminist anger," the anger of the aging, racial shame, and politicized compassion. These chapters do important work to set up how Woodward thinks about (and with) emotions, but the real heart of the book, I think, is the second half on "new feelings," and particularly the final essay, titled, like the book itself, "Statistical Panic."* In these chapters, Woodward offers rubrics for thinking about the emotions occasioned by postmodern life, such as "sympathy for nonhuman cyborgs" and "bureaucratic rage," emotions that are often "impersonal" (you aren't really angry at the particular unhelpful bureaucrat on the other end of the line, for example, but rather at the bureaucracy itself). "Statistical Panic," I find, very powerfully names a "structure of feeling" embedded in what Ulrich Beck calls the "risk society." "Our bodies," Woodward points out, "are figured as being in a perpetual state of risk. The statistics profiling the body are for the most part melancholy and grim .... fatally we feel that a certain statistic, which is in fact based on an aggregate and is only a measure of probability, represents our very future" (196). Since the very nature of the statistic is to belong not to individuals but to groups, the emotions that statistics occasion oscillate between panic and boredom, postmodern analogues, Woodward suggests, to the modern dyad of shock/ennui.

Statistical Panic does not operate by argument but rather by constellation, juxtaposition, and suggestion. Woodward's language is most frequently a language of presentation: I refer to... I turn to... I take up ... Benjamin offers... X represents [emotion] in this way, while Y represents it in this other way. The book is therefore frustrating precisely when it is the most successful; at its most suggestive moments, I found myself wishing that Woodward would take an idea or a reading further, only to have her move on to some other, equally provocative text.

I particularly wished for greater pressure on the literary elements in this book; Woodward's eclecticism is clearly intentional, yet I frequently found myself wishing for a more explicit articulation of what role genre was playing in this map of the emotions. While Woodward often discusses popular culture in the familiar condemnatory terms ("postmodern televisual culture" and its tabloid obsessions, for instance, or the too-pat representation of statistics in the television drama Chicago Hope), any theory of the relationship between genre and feeling is at best only hinted at. Although in the introduction she suggests that "countering a fragment, or providing nuanced context for an information-story, is a more ample narrative -- a story," I wished for more on just what a "story" was, in contradistinction to the "information-story." These terms immediately conjured up for me Walter Benjamin's distinction between the "story" and "information" in his essay "The Storyteller," an essay that Woodward explicitly alludes to in her chapter on "Bureaucratic Rage" (172). But while Benjamin's terms are useful for Woodward, she ultimately and perhaps misleadingly uses them in quite a different way. The "story" that she privileges is above all the memoir, which she describes as "a medium promising (although not always delivering) intimate voices that allow us entrance into [the authors'] lives" (191). I cannot help thinking that this is more or less the opposite of what Benjamin means by "story," as I remember the moment in "The Storyteller" when Benjamin writes that

With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth.

It seems to me that the memoirs of "the tiny, fragile human body" that Woodward examines work much differently than the Benjaminian "story," and yet they do something for Woodward's account of postmodern feelings that is worth theorizing in greater depth. Precisely because, as Woodward so lucidly observes, statistics seem to encapsulate stories about our futures, a theory of how stories work in the age of statistical panic -- sometimes called the "information age" -- seems warranted.

Yet my desire to see such a theory articulated is, I recognize, a measure of the success with which Statistical Panic maps out an emotional terrain and places crucial issues in conversation. One cannot fairly complain that a book is not three chapters longer than it is, and I come away from reading this book with a raft of notes and references, especially on the studies of aging, illness, and disability, areas that have tended to be insufficiently attended to in theories of postmodernity.


*An earlier version of "Statistical Panic" appears in differences 11.2 (1999): 177-203, Duke Journals Online, PDF.

I have that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you add A Room of One's Own to a syllabus.

* * *

I like much of what Neil Verma has to say about the defensive The Humanities Are Dead essay. He admits near the end, though, that he doesn't know what the alternative is yet. May I propose Humanities!: The Musical?

* * *

Oh, dear. Alma mater, could you please stop doing so many embarrassing things?

Being understood/being believed

There are many interesting statements of feminist poetics at Delirious Hem.

It is not enough that you understand me. I would rather be believed. Imagine a kind of love that has no Greek word for it and then imagine that we could make a system in which all connections are made of this. Imagine a human system like culture that could make the public private and the private okay. I do not know what to do with the powerful except try to offer them some things to look at that they were trained not to see. Bernadette Mayer wrote “I hate power, except the power I have to show you something.” On this and many other things I require your attention, also your advice.
    -- Anne Boyer

I like Boyer's distinction between being understood and being believed. There's such a long history of "woman" being an object of investigation, as Woolf describes in A Room of One's Own:

One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

To say "I understand her" places the speaker in the position of knowing; whether the woman knows anything is left very much in doubt; perhaps it is only the woman herself, as object, that is being understood. To say "I believe her," on the other hand, places the woman in the position of knowing. It is a position of power, i.e. "to show you something." To be a poet is first of all to be capable of knowledge.

(Via Silliman and his amazing technicolor Google alerts.)

Two kinds of cross-dressing in young adult fiction

As I've mentioned before, teaching A Room of One's Own forced me to face up to the overwhelming prevalence of the girl-in-drag-has-adventures meme. It is everywhere, from Shakespearean comedies to Mulan.

Several YA books that I've mentioned on this blog wholeheartedly embrace the idea that a girl should embrace her Inner Dude by making it her Outer Duds. In Boston Jane you're practically clubbed over the head with it. In Philadelphia, Jane wears corsets and is exaggeratedly feminine; out west, she loses the corset and Finds Herself (TM). In The Shakespeare Stealer, a girl is shown, without a trace of irony, making it in the Globe Theater by cross-dressing (in order to cross-dress yet again on the stage). And don't even get me into Alanna.

I find this device deeply irritating when it's used in order to mock women for being oppressed. This is the case in Boston Jane, and to some extent in Mulan as well (although Mulan actually does some interesting things with the performance of gender). Such narratives are merely another spin of the patriarchy wheel: "girls are stupid and useless, and if you want to avoid being stupid and useless you have to become an exception to your gender."

So I was interested to read Mary Hoffman's City of Stars, about a fifteen-year-old girl named Georgia O'Grady, who travels in her sleep to Talia, the Renaissance Italy of a parallel dimension. She's a loner at school and is bullied in particular by her older stepbrother Russell. Russell's taunts are truly vile, and insistently sexual. This fifteen-year-old girl loves horses, practically the quintessential little-girl obsession, but Russell spins it as a cheap Freudian substitute for frustrated sexuality, constantly accusing Georgia of both out-of-control desire and sexual failure (he actually calls a fifteen-year-old a "spinster"), simultaneously female and insufficiently feminine. Especially given that he's her older step-brother, the fixation on Georgia's body and on her sexuality is extraordinarily creepy.

So: she puts on drag.

Not drag in the sense of "drag queen," but drag in the sense of a sexual masquerade: she effaces the social markers of her femininity. With her short hair and baggy clothes that hide the shape of her body, Georgia announces that she withdraws from the femininity game. She knows she cannot win it and she doesn't intend to play.

But unlike in the spunky-girl narrative, merely wearing trousers does not solve Georgia's problems. She doesn't suddenly come into dudely awesomeness, complete with spitballs and weaponry. Instead, she travels to to another world, where she becomes embroiled in a complicated political situation marked by magic. There she dresses as a boy, since the demands of femininity are even stronger in this world, and there is no hope of avowing femininity with such short hair. Nonetheless, all of the friends that Georgia makes there know her to be a girl in boys' clothing (and haircut), not a boy or even an honorary boy.

Georgia eventually saves the day in a public event under the name "Giorgio Gredi," and the ability to pose as a boy certainly helps her in the "city of stars." But the real difference in this alternate world is not that she acts boyish -- she acts the same as she does at home -- but that she has a chance to interact with people who are not vile sexists. Putting on drag at home is a defense; putting on drag in Talia is mostly fallout from the situation at home. Georgia has her adventures in boys' clothing, but those adventures allow her to re-embrace femininity from a place of safety rather than anoint her an honorary XY.



I'm partly struck by the way the masquerade in City of Stars echoes the masquerade in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle. Like Georgia, the protagonist of Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie, starts out under a sexual threat, though it's much more euphemized here than in City of Stars. Sophie, the eldest of three daughters in a fairy-tale universe is constrained by what's expected of women and of eldest daughters.

"What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?" she asked as she ran. I'd be far too scared. It comes of being the eldest of three."

When she reached Market Square, it was worse, if possible. Most of the inns were in the Square. Crowds of young men swaggered beerily to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping buckled boots they would never have dreamed of waring on a working day, calling loud remarks and accosting girls. The girls strolled in fine pairs, ready to be accosted. It was perfectly normal for May Day, but Sophie was scared of that too.

Ho-hum, it's just another day in patriarchy-land, with the usual catcalls from drunken men.

Sophie is suddenly freed from the sexual threats of her world by being magically disguised not as a man but as an elderly woman. In her pseudo-old age, she is no longer expected to be a sexual victim; instead she is free to be catankerous, eccentric, and bossy, something her apparent old age lets her get away with. As an elderly woman, Sophie's even mistaken for a witch, a category seen as repulsive yet powerful.

It's an interesting twist on girl-in-drag-has-adventures; although elderly women are not free from the threat of sexual violence, that threat is more socially acknowledged as inappropriate, unlike the harassment of young women, which is "perfectly normal." Sophie escapes into a marginalized category, and its similarity to Georgia's escape into androgyny is revealing.

In books like Boston Jane, a particular model of masculinity itself is powerful, desirable, and laudable, and is therefore the thing to be emulated. The way to kick ass is to approximate masculinity.

The sexual masquerades of City of Stars and Howl's Moving Castle, in contrast, are not attempts to emulate masculinity but to seek the kind of exemption from the threat of sexual violence that masculinity (anxiously) entails. These sexual masquerades are recognized as unsustainable but crucial stopgaps that allow the young female protagonists the respite from sexual threat that is necessary to develop selfhood. Undercover as a boy or as an elderly woman, these protagonists get a chance to build up reserves of experience and strength.

Of course I have mixed feelings about how femininity manifests at the end of the novels as heterosexuality and empowerfully normative beauty; surely there is more to achieving a secure home environment than a boyfriend and a halter top. After all, in City of Stars, the crucial resolution at home is similar to that in Talia: thanks in part (but not entirely) to Georgia's opportunity to spend some time around people who aren't vile sexists, Georgia's parents wake up and stop her being surrounded by vile sexists. In Howl's Moving Castle, something surprisingly similar occurs: Howl regains his heart and stops his predatory womanizing. So it's a bit disappointing that, in the end, both protagonists get makeovers.

But partly I think these endings recognize the difficulty of these radical positions. The woman who is rejected as beyond the pale of unfemininity is not resisting femininity by choice. She may embrace her position as a position of resistance, but because others have constructed her very body as unassimilable to society, she is abjected (the "radically excluded," as Kristeva famously puts it).

Georgia's drag is a sign of her abjection, of absenting herself from the game of gender by trying to become androgynous (which here means boyish, on which more could be said). Sophie's drag is also imposed, by the Witch of the Waste, and similarly represents Sophie's desire to exempt herself from the sexual economy. It is a radical position, yes, but also a painful one and a dangerous one. This drag is not the stuff of Butlerian parody but rather of self defense, and existing as a marginal figure (of ambiguous gender, of old age) carries with it its own problems.

The two protagonists therefore undertake the dangerous performance of femininity by drawing on a period of differently but equally dangerous resistance through sexual masquerade. Masquerade supplies not only a period of subject-formation in which the protagonists are allowed a sense of personal integrity (to wit: the notion that they own their bodies) but also the means of removing vile sexists from the vicinity.

Though I'm ambivalent about these endings -- I find them too easy -- I can see a certain logic to them. These protagonists have made femininity safe for themselves. That it takes magic and/or trips to an alternate universe in order to accomplish it registers the precariousness of that safety.

I went to Emeryville.

Some frightful things were happening with my ancient but trusty laptop, so I schlepped down to Emeryville today to get it checked out.

Not to worry: it was just a problem with the battery. I am posting using the ancient but trusty laptop itself, at this very moment.

Far more terrifying were the myriad ads and signage around the Bay Street shopping center, where the Apple store is located. One ad that I saw made me turn around in horror, walk in the opposite direction, and promptly repress the memory. I truly do not remember what it was, merely that it was horrible.

I saw a large ad in a Victoria's Secret window advertising some article of clothing or other that was supposed to make you an "irresistible object of desire." My brain almost exploded at that crystalline instantiation of how sexualized femininity is marketed. Irresistible, yet an object. Indeed, irresistible because an object: "Ladies, the best way for you to be powerful is to be powerless. Just keep still and nobody will be able to resist the demands that you are not making." It's like they're parodying themselves.

Additionally, most days the "Inappropriate Co-optation of a Virginia Woolf Quotation" award goes to a mediocre book shop down the street from me, whose proprietors seem to be going about under the impression that Mrs. Dalloway is about flowers instead of being about trying not to kill yourself.

But today we have a different winner. Who posted "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well" on the wall, out of context?

Why, the Pottery Barn, of course.



I mean, doesn't the Pottery Barn totally remind you of women's unequal access to education in the 1920s?

I should never leave my house without my camera.