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Joanna Russ's unclassifiable style: How to Suppress Women’s Writing

#1
C C Offline
https://thebaffler.com/latest/no-mothers...rs-crispin

EXCERPT: . . . As a novelist and short story writer, [Joanna] Russ does not simply create hazy gender utopias in her science fiction space operas, nor does she write in the way of her male peers like Heinlein, Haldeman, or Ellison, with their big(ish) dicks in space. In books like We Who Are About To and The Female Man, she used speculation to question the present, not simply reframe it, putting her more on par with Samuel Delany than with more “womanly” writers like Marge Piercy or Octavia Butler. She had a remarkable mind, finding it easy to see through tropes and lazy, self-satisfied plotlines to mess with the trouble underneath. In We Who Are About To, she firmly and eruditely reveals stories of survival against the odds, a story all demographics are quick to indulge in unthinkingly, not to be heroic stories of endurance but to truly be about people who are willing to do any amount of damage to the world, to others, to the environment, to ensure their own comfort and safety. This woman works so deep in our collective unconscious it’s surprising she ever saw the light of day.

[...] Russ did not write “like a woman,” so it’s not clear what to do with her. She did not write about domestic or interior spaces, her writing is neither pretty nor diplomatic. As a nonfiction writer and critic—particularly in How to Suppress Women’s Writing and the remarkable Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic—she does not simply name the injustice, she goes after the source. She understands how a fragile self-will need to define itself against an Other, and she is wise enough to see this is not an issue of misogyny per se but rather something that has the potential to infect us all. That need for the Other to be a specific something, so that in reflection the Self can be something better, creates a lens that makes it impossible to see the Other clearly without risking the Self. We can only see and judge art through this lens, unless we stubbornly refuse it.

White women will do this to brown women, the rich will do this to the poor, gay men will do this to lesbians or bisexuals. And of course, if somehow we lived in a matriarchy, women would do this to men. This might seem like a banal observation when you read it, and yet so few have written it down before. This makes Russ a keener critic than someone like Angela Carter, who has been entered into the feminine canon because she had a tendency, despite all her wild glory, to say rather banal things about the male-female dynamic. She lined it up much too neatly with the predator-prey dynamic. Carter writes “like a woman,” so we know what to do with her. The only other woman critic I can think of to work on Russ’s complicated level was Brigid Brophy, who has also been very unfairly left to languish in obscurity.

[...] Reading Joanna Russ’s *How to Suppress Women’s Writing*, I wondered, what the hell is it going to take? For decades we have had these types of critiques. We have had books and lectures and personal essays and statistics and scientific studies about unconscious bias. And yet still we have critics like Jonathan Franzen speculating on whether Edith Wharton’s physical beauty (or lack of it, as is his assessment of her face and body) affected her writing, we have a literary culture that is still dominated by one small segment of the population, we have a sense that every significant contribution to the world of letters was made by the heterosexual white man—and that sense is reinforced in the education system, in the history books, and in the visible world.

This complaint wasn’t even exactly fresh territory when Russ wrote her book, which I do not say to diminish her accomplishment. It is always an act of bravery to stand up to say these things, to risk being thought of as ungrateful. [...] But what is it going to take to break apart these rigidities? Russ’s book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there’s not an enormous difference between the world she describes and the one we currently inhabit.

Sure, there have been some improvements. [...] (But while we are at it, we are still mostly only hearing from white men who want to provide the objective and universal voice of reason, not all of the weirdos and gender noncomformists and mystics and those marginalized by something other than sex or race, and I long for their presence in the conversation, too.)

And so I ask, again and again and again, what is it going to take to have a full reconsideration of how literature has been dominated by one small worldview, to see how our ideas of greatness are infested by our own need to see our selves, our gender, our nation as great, and to see radical plurality as this exciting, beautiful thing, and not a threat to your tiny little self?

MORE: https://thebaffler.com/latest/no-mothers...rs-crispin
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#2
confused2 Offline
Looking at the list of best-selling authors...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_be...on_authors
female writers seem to be reasonably well represented... so I'm not sure what the complaint (?) is about. Is it that books by female authors are less likely to be published? Are reviewers depressing sales by saying "Don't bother with this - it's a chick book." or what?
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#3
C C Offline
(Apr 9, 2018 10:18 PM)confused2 Wrote: Looking at the list of best-selling authors...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_be...on_authors
female writers seem to be reasonably well represented... so I'm not sure what the complaint (?) is about. Is it that books by female authors are less likely to be published? Are reviewers depressing sales by saying "Don't bother with this - it's a chick book." or what?


It's about Russ. In essence, Jessa Crispin contends that Russ's approach was more fundamental or closer to the actual problem source than the boxes which minority, the peripheral slash alienated, and women's critical literature typically functions in. Due to that, there's concern that even if her obscurity lifts eventually, she could be miscategorized in those existing pigeonholes and thus the mainstream future miss that she was operating at a level that was prior in rank to gender, class, sexual orientation, race, etc.

Crispin: She [Russ] understands how a fragile self-will need to define itself against an Other, and she is wise enough to see this is not an issue of misogyny per se but rather something that has the potential to infect us all. [...] This makes Russ a keener critic than someone like Angela Carter, who has been entered into the feminine canon because she had a tendency [...] to say rather banal things about the male-female dynamic. She lined it up much too neatly with the predator-prey dynamic. Carter writes “like a woman,” so we know what to do with her. [..."Russ did not write 'like a woman,' so it’s not clear what to do with her."...]

Here is my fear: I fear if Russ is rediscovered, re-shelved and reintegrated, she will be mistakenly put among all of the other books by women and other marginalized populations. Put her where she belongs, in a space with zero qualifications, Literary Criticism, or Essays, or just Literature. Spare her the indignity of the sub-group.

[...] As women gain entry into these halls of power that have been occupied and protected by men, they show they will behave the way their predecessors did. White (straight, middle class, gender conforming) women are now an established market, and because of that, we are pandered to. And it turns out that women often like the same self-reinforcement that men do. As women gain entry into these halls of power that have been occupied and protected by men, they show they will behave the way their predecessors did. They, too, will demonize, willfully misunderstand, and compartmentalize all of the Other demographics. [...] I am worried the new readers will mostly see themselves as the suppressed and not the suppressors.

~
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#4
C C Offline
(Apr 9, 2018 10:18 PM)confused2 Wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_be...on_authors
female writers seem to be reasonably well represented...


Concerning that specific area: Crispin acknowledges the changes, the multifariousness in published material. But asserts those writers are still not contributing to or influencing the dominant worldview (as straight white men supposedly do -- or increasingly, white women).

Sure, there have been some improvements. The ratios of bylines by sex and race have improved, but that was mostly due to persistent online campaigns of shaming than any sort of editorial revelation. The unconscious assumptions that create our expectations for women writers or black writers or gay writers often remain the same. If you look beyond the numbers and into content, you’ll see that white men are still the experts, still the objective and universal voice of reason. Black writers are often only asked to write about black issues or urban issues or sports or music. Women are often only asked to write about their feelings or the work-life balance or domestic issues. Gay writers are asked to write about identity politics or sexuality, and so on. (But while we are at it, we are still mostly only hearing from white men who want to provide the objective and universal voice of reason, not all of the weirdos and gender noncomformists and mystics and those marginalized by something other than sex or race, and I long for their presence in the conversation, too.)

Of course, if some of the mythos elements of the heterogeneous expansion (diversity of human-groups) fall into a crank / woo or indemonstrable category, then the standards of philosophy of science and traditional intellectual / expertise activity in the West would be blocking them. That's not directly or wholly due to "straight white males" but to the success of an establishment which is arguably meshing well with a supposed objective world (or at least controlling / exploiting its properties better than alternative thought-orientations of the past or elsewhere). The cultures, genders, classes, sexual orientations, and social-construct races which decide to conform to the same system arguably likewise contribute or benefit (China certainly has since it stopped adhering to strict Marxist slash Mao gospel).

But whether or not there's a global disaster or "big price to pay" awaiting at the end of the train ride of "Western methodology, reasoning, commercial technological progression, republic democracy, capitalism, etc" is something the future has yet to determine. Even if civilization does optimistically survive to a transhumanism and posthumanisn phase, those radical transformations alone would make the original human species passé both physiologically and psychologically -- maybe even sociologically (hive-mind, etc).

~
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#5
Syne Offline
No, history has already determined that "Western methodology, reasoning, commercial technological progression, republic democracy, capitalism, etc" are better than all alternatives. That progress and prosperity are bound to them. And that any attempt to destroy them are overtly suicidal, at best.
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