Fuck Yeah, Gender Studies! was set up to discuss gender, sexuality, body politics & related issues from the very personal to the universal & everything in between; to address those gender/sexuality issues that, though of great importance, get fewer column inches than they should.
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A miscellany of thoughts
Sinfield separates gender identity and sexual orientation by describing them, respectively, as “desire to be” and “desire for” (Sinfield, A., in “The Challenge of Transgender, the Moment of Stonewall, and Neil Bartlett”, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10:2, 2004, 267-272).
I actually think “desire to be” doesn’t really cover gender identity so well as “desire to inhabit” might (which doesn’t even really cover it; in some cases “desire to perform”, or “desire to enact” might fit better).
I suppose what i’m saying is that i *really* don’t like Sinfield’s assessment of gender identity because i think it’s prescriptive and erasing, but my alternatives aren’t much better. I’m becoming increasingly tired of having to places things in boxes, even ones with ones painted with rainbows and LBGTTQQIIAA+ slogans on the side.
Queeory is, i fear, facing in the wrong direction. And i know that Sinfield was 6 years ago, but.
Gender and publishing: why do women write fiction and men write literature?
Of course, they don’t. That’s balls. But it is true that men still far outnumber women in terms of publishing deals and book sales.
This article from The Atlantic discusses the issue, making particular reference to Jodi Picoult (and other ‘chick lit’ writers) and their llambasting of NYTimes book review bias.
Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, two writers whose work is often referred to as “chick lit,” have been tweeting and commenting in the press about Michiko Kukatani’s rave review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom; Piccoult mused that she’d love to see “the NYT rave about writers who aren’t white male literary darlings” and busted on Kakutani for using the word “lapidiary” in her review. Weiner tweeted ”Carl Hiaasan doesn’t have to choose between getting aTimes review and being a bestseller. Why should I? Oh right #girlparts.”
See also this article by Alison Flood at The Guardian.
Contacted by blog the NYT Picker, Picoult reaffirmed her view that “the Times favours white male authors. That isn’t to say someone else might get a good review – only that if you are white and male and living in Brooklyn you have better odds, or so it seems”.
“The NYT has long made it clear that they value literary fiction and disdain commercial fiction – and they disparage it regardless of race or gender of the author,” said the author. “I’m not commenting on one specific critic or even on my own reviews (which are few and far between because I write commercial fiction). How else can the Times explain the fact that white male authors are ROUTINELY assigned reviews in both the Sunday review section AND the daily book review section (often both raves) while so many other writers go unnoticed by their critics?”
Very interesting reading. And it’s very much in my field, being both Gender-y and Literary-y. Cor, i’m eloquent today. Anyway, here’s what i think:
Whilst i lament as much as anyone (and, in fact, probably more) the sorry lack of venerated female authors in comparison to male authors, i can’t say that Jodi Picoult’s books are worth rave reviews (and certainly not in the order of Franzen’s). White or not, male or not, whoever Johnathan Franzen is (and yes i know he is white and male, but you can’t tell that from his writing ffs), his writing is stellar. It’s fucking fantastic. The Corrections is one of my all-time favourite novels and How to be Alone is fabulous critico-cultural commentary. He’s a great writer. Picoult just doesn’t compare…but nor does Dan Brown: it’s not because Picoult’s a woman that she doesn’t compare, it’s because her writing just isn’t very good. It may be entertaining, yes, and it may sell lots of copies, of course, but neither of those are markers of good writing so much as they are markers of popularity.
A metaphor: the publishing world is a college or high school. “The Academy” is the faculty; authors and the public are the students. Jodi Picoult may get voted Class President or even Student Body President—because those are popularity contests—but she would be overlooked for the Dean’s List and for Academic prizes because her work is not outstanding. Nothing to do with her gender. Whilst Franzen would be more of a teacher’s pet, so would Margaret Atwood or Jeanette Winterson or Virginia Woolf.
I guess what’s i’m trying to say is that whilst it’s a terrible thing that men outnumber women in the world of books/publishing/literature, Jodi Picoult just isn’t any good.
An analogy: Sports. In the sport world, men’s teams have far, far more publicity than women’s teams. Coverage of women’s events at the Olympics is far shorter than the coverage of men’s events. Salaries are less, usually [though, interestingly, at Wimbledon the men’s and women’s prizes are the same in terms of cash amount but the women players play fewer matches than the men].
But just because all that is true, and Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, let’s say, are being honoured in the press for their achievements, that doesn’t mean that *my* not being similarly honoured—I am a lowly amateur runner who nonetheless raises hundreds of pounds for charity every year—reflects gender favouritism of the part of sports media. I’m not covered because i’m not very good. And whilst, yes, Paula Radcliffe may not get the same amount of column inches, and whilst there is an inherent sexism within the industry, it also does not mean that Bolt or Phelps should be attacked for favouritism as by any standard they are extremely talented athletes.
The gender inequality in publishing isn’t good. Of course it isn’t. But neither is Jodi Picoult—and it seems to me that for her this is less about the gender inequality than it is about her feeling sore for not getting on the Dean’s List. Popularity and talent are not the same thing.
A post on gender AND race? You lucky ducks.
This comes from an Op-Ed in yesterday’s NYT. Click through for the whole article.
…More than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. And I’ve been hearing more and more lately from community leaders in poor areas that moms are absent for one reason or another and the children are being raised by a grandparent or some other relative — or they end up in foster care.
That the black community has not been mobilized en masse to turn this crisis around is a screaming shame. Black men, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have nearly a one-third chance of being incarcerated at some point in their lives. By the time they hit their mid-30s, a solid majority of black men without a high school diploma have spent time in prison.
Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men, with the murderous wounds in most cases inflicted by other young black men.
This is a cancer that has been allowed to metastasize for decades. Not only is it not being treated, most people don’t even want to talk about it. In virtually every facet of life in the United States, black people — and especially black boys and men — are coming up short. White families are typically five times as wealthy as black families. More than a third of all black children are growing up in poverty. In Ohio, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty, the percentage is more than half. […]
A somewhat lighthearted post: projecting gender stereotypes into the animal kingdom
Okay, so i’ve been spending the majority of the last few days trying to get my head around the process of applying to US PhD programmes. (This GRE business is so fucked; how does my capability to remember trigonometry have any bearing on my capability to get a PhD and be a kick-ass teacher of GS & Literature?!)
But, i digress. I’m not really in the frame of mind right now to tackle something really “big”, especially after dealing with all the drama and getting all sorts of slut-shame/blame…. So, here’s something to add a little levity to the blog/my day:
Projecting gender stereotypes into the animal kingdom.
Happens all the fucking time.
I have a puppy, a labrador-spaniel cross, all black. Hecuba. She looks much more spanielly now, but when i first got her she looked more or less like any pure lab. And *everybody* assumed she was a boy. Not just other pet owners in the waiting room, who were going on snap-judgements—my family did, too. A lot. What is (was) it about my dog that made people assume she was male? Apparently labs, at least black ones, are really masculine dogs. So much so that for weeks my little brother called her “he”, despite being corrected (and he’s thirteen!). People on the street, too: “oh, he’s a boisterous thing!” “he’s looks like a lot of fun” “what a handsome boy”, etc. Even the receptionist at the vet did it.
So, i did some research (that is, i asked my little brother). Chihuahuas? Female. Spaniels? Female. Staffies? Male. Jack Russels? Male. What the fuck?! I checked these answers. Others agreed. WHERE DID THIS COME FROM?!
Of course, now that Hecuba has grown up some (she’s not even 5 months yet), she’s become a lot more spanielly. Fluffy ears, long(er than a labrador’s) coat, etc. And SUDDENLY she’s female. Strangers we meet on the street tell me how “pretty” she is. In fact, one woman, after asking her name and getting the answer, said “oh, i’ll just call her Pretty”. (No wonder Hecuba barks at this woman now whenever we see her; i would too if they’d objectified me!)
Works with cats, too. My mum has two cats. Toms. They don’t like Hecuba. And guess what? Everyone assumes they’re female. Little bro says that the cats should be girls and Hecuba should be a boy.
This saddens me greatly. How and why did these gender stereotypes transfer over? Why do we project them? Sigh.
An open letter to numbersandlife
(Because everyone should fucking know about this douchecanoe.)
I didn’t take issue with the misogynistic, rape-apologist, piss-ignorant bullshit you’ve been spouting because i’m bored. I took issue (still do; you haven’t changed in the last 8 hours or so) with it because i think it’s abhorrent. How you can in one post suggest that feminism is a great thing (and, hey, that’s fine—it fucking is) and that feminist shouldn’t be a dirty word but in another post, within hours, strip women—and you are a woman, which makes this oh-so-much-more incomprehensible—of the dignity they deserve and which feminism attempts to restore?
You said in another post that if you had been the girl in STFUsexists’s post (who got attacked whilst unconscious after being intentionally plied with (pass-out-inducing amounts of) alcohol for that premeditated end by someone she considered a friend) you wouldn’t have been attacked because you wouldn’t have been alone with a male friend.
Tell me, do you think this is a practical method of preventing assault? Do you genuinely believe that men and women should not be alone together in case the man rapes the woman? What about couples? What about married couples?
Your views are not only backwards, impractical and illogical, all of which demonstrate your small-mindedness, they perpetuate a fucking fuckton of stereotypes, assumptions and patriarchal, phallocratic, socio-sexual rules:
1) That all men cannot be trusted
2) That all men are would-be rapists and that rape is an entirely understandable natural urge that all men have (and are under no obligation to control)
3) That women are JUST TOO TEMPTING and must be kept under lock and key or away from men.
4) That any woman who breaks Stupid Rule 3 is a slut
5) That any woman who breaks Stupid Rule 3, whatever the scenario, deserves anything terrible that might happen to her (i.e. she asked for it)
6) That when it comes to sexual assaults there are two types of victim: “innocent” (a woman who plays by all your rules and has been ambushed) and “guilty” (anybody else (the sluts): these women have it coming)
7) That women are culpable for the crimes committed against them
8) That the onus is on women to make themselves undesirable or invisible to stop men, for whom rape is only natural, according to you, attacking them.
9) That rape is a crime of desire and sexual attraction, not one of violence, misogyny and oppression.
I could go on.
Your posts anger me. They also upset me. I truly don’t understand how a woman like you, any woman, can hold these views and have the audacity to boast feminist credentials. Moreover, i don’t understand how you can hold these views full stop. Haven’t you ever had the experience of being intruded upon by men in some way, just for trying to live your ife the way that you choose? Haven’t you ever felt objectified, degraded, insulted, mistreated, bullied or attacked by a man because you’re a woman? Haven’t you ever been called a slut or a skank or a bitch? Haven’t you ever felt the sting of unfaltering systemic misogyny?
If so, you’re unique. You’re the only one, and a lucky woman.
But, i don’t think so.
I’ll be uploading a video on abortion issues tomorrow. Watch out for it at http://www.youtube.com/user/iamthelighthouse.
(That is, what we (gender equality nuts) already know.)
Behavioural differences between the sexes are not hard-wired at birth but are the result of society’s expectations, say scientists.
From this Sunday’s (Aug 15) Observer, main edition, p. 15. Also HERE.
It is the mainstay of countless magazine and newspaper features. Differences between male and female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing emotion – can be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed.
Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.
The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of “neurosexism”, as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children’s education.
In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. “It is flexible, malleable and changeable,” she said.
In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility. It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. “All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong,” she told the Observer.
“Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children’s intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don’t inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.”
Thus boys develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because they are expected and are encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents.
The latter example, on the issue of verbal skills, is particularly revealing, neuroscientists argue. Girls do begin to speak earlier than boys, by about a month on average, a fact that is seized upon by supporters of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus school of intellectual differences.
However, this gap is really a tiny difference compared to the vast range of linguistic abilities that differentiate people, Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, pointed out. His studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children’s verbal development is due to their gender.
“If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild,” Plomin told theObserver.
This point is backed by Eliot. “Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different,” she states in a recent paper in New Scientist. “But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus stereotypes suggest.
“Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing, emphasising, navigating and other cognitive differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains.
“All such skills are learned and neuro-plasticity – the modifications of neurons and their connections in response experience – trumps hard-wiring every time.”
The current popular stress on innate intellectual differences between the sexes is, in part, a response to psychologists’ emphasis of the environment’s importance in the development of skills and personality in the 1970s and early 1980s, said Eliot. This led to a reaction against nurture as the principal factor in the development of human characteristics and to an exaggeration of the influence of genes and inherited abilities. This view is also popular because it propagates the status quo, she added. “We are being told there is nothing we can do to improve our potential because it is innate. That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills.”
In short, women can read maps despite claims that they lack the spatial skills for such efforts, while men can learn to empathise and need not be isolated like Mel Gibson’s Nick Marshall, the emotionally retarded male lead of the film What Women Want and a classic stereotype of the unfeeling male that is perpetuated by the supporters of the hard-wired school of intellectual differences.
This point was also stressed by Fine. “Many of the studies that claim to highlight differences between the brains of males and females are spurious. They are based on tests carried out on only a small number of individuals and their results are often not repeated by other scientists. However, their results are published and are accepted by teachers and others as proof of basic differences between boys and girls.
“All sorts of ridiculous conclusions about very important issues are then made. Already sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.”
So should we abandon our search for the “real” differences between the sexes and give up this “pernicious pinkification of little girls”, as one scientist has put it?
Yes, we should, Eliot insisted. “There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience.”
What they say
Cambridge University psychologist and autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen:
“The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems”
Writer and feminist Joan Smith:
“Very few women growing up in England in the late 18th century would have understood the principles of jurisprudence or navigation because they were denied access to them”
John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus:
“A man’s sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results. A woman’s sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships”
Sociologist Beth Hess:
“For two millennia, ‘impartial experts’ have given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat to boil the blood and purify the soul, that their heads are too small, their wombs too big, their hormones too debilitating, that they think with their hearts or the wrong side of the brain. The list is never-ending”
Well, well, well. This isn’t news to me, but perhaps people will start to take note and let this men-are-better-at-women-can’t-do bullshit attitude die a swift death and never be remembered. Here’s hoping.
Oh, surely involuntary commitment doesn’t happen anymore, right? Women are never committed for being ‘troublesome.’ Brutal methods are not applied as treatments in psychiatric facilities. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It happens all the time, and equally sinisterly, psychiatrisation is used on an entirely new level. Women are routinely saddled with labels like ‘borderline personality disorder’ (BPD) and ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ and other ‘personality disorders.’ Men who exhibit the same ‘symptoms’ do not receive these diagnoses. Indeed, in men, some of these ‘symptoms’ are actually viewed as desirable traits.
Men who experience trauma have post traumatic stress disorder. Women who experience trauma and have the exact same set of symptoms have BPD. That’s a pretty stark disparity, wouldn’t you say? When you look at mental health statistics and you see that women are more likely to have certain psychiatric conditions, something that gets left out is disparities in how these conditions are diagnosed, and how people with the same symptoms will receive a different diagnosis not just on the basis of seeing a different doctor, but on the basis of their gender identities.
The use of psychiatry to marginalise women is, honestly, rather brilliant. People fear mental illness, they fear ‘crazy,’ at the same time that they take psychiatry as an entirely reliable science, something that cannot be questioned or doubted. Once the crazy label is applied, it is remarkably different to peel off, and treating perfectly normal behaviours as ‘crazy’ when they occur in women reinforces the commonly held idea that ‘all women are crazy.’ That women are irrational. That, again, women do not know what is good for them and cannot be trusted to make decisions for themselves.
Women who speak out, women who go against the grain, women who question the system, women who have emotions, women who express themselves, can be very easily tagged with a psychiatric diagnosis that can be extremely difficult to get rid of. Many of the diagnoses applied to women involve conditions considered ‘dangerous.’ A woman might be a ‘danger to herself and others,’ so she can be committed, yes, involuntarily. Family members, guardians, law enforcement, all of these people can make the decision to commit a woman on the basis of her psychiatric history, even if a diagnostic label was not applied properly.
Many people are surprised to learn about the tangled and complex history of psychiatrisation and the ways in which it has been used to silence, marginalise, and oppress women. Unfortunately, many of these same people are unaware that the same tactics used in 1600 are still being used today, albeit under different names. Sexism is embedded into the structure of a number of psychiatric diagnoses and it causes real harm today, right now, quite possibly in your very community.
Perhaps even in your very household. The thing about psychiatrisation is that it has an insidious hold. If you are told enough times that you have a ‘disorder’ and your behaviour is ‘abnormal’ and you need treatment, you are going to be believe it. You are going to stop believing your emotions. You are going to stop trusting your responses to the world around you. You will agree that, yes, of course, it is all for your own good.
For all of the real benefits in recognising and treating actual mental health conditions, there are hidden costs that are not commonly addressed. We need to be talking about why it is that there are such significant racial and gender disparities in psychiatric diagnosis, and we need to be discussing the fact that, clearly, racism and sexism play a role in how psychiatrists and other mental health professionals interact with their patients.
More @ source
Frances Farmer anyone. PS. Everyone watch the heartbreaking movie, “Frances”.
Reblogged for truth. Also add Susanna Kaysen. Not so tragic a tale, perhaps, but telling nonetheless. Cos, you know, promiscuity is a mental illness—but only in women!! Sigh.
In my teens, i underwent therapy for BPD. In both the group therapy cycles i did, groups of about 10 each time, there were no men. All but one of the participants was a virgin and although our ages ranged from 14-19, with the mean age being about 17.3 (so, legal), we spent the majority of the 2.5-hour sessions (which were weekly, for four months per “round” (so 8 months of it for me)) talking about our “behaviours” of promiscuity.
No mention of the real reason we were in therapy in the first place (depression). No mention of coping mechanisms. Deliberate avoidance of the issue of our blatant misdiagnoses. No answers when we asked where all the ‘Borderline’ boys were.
It’s a fucking joke. Only we weren’t/aren’t laughing.
