Links for a Friday

--Anent the New York Times's coverage of the gang rape in Cleveland, Texas, which a couple of us posted about a few days ago, an update is in order. Not only did the New York Times article blame the victim, but it also excluded race issues from its report. In her post at Colorlines, The Gang Rape of a Latina 6th Grader, and a Horrific Community Response, Akiba Solomon does a superb job of discussing the rape, community reaction to it, and reactions to the reactions to the reactions-- without ignoring race issues. (Link thanks to Suzie at Echidne of the Snakes, who also posts at length on the complications of the situation omitted from the Times' article.)

--A bill sponsored by the Republicans, expected to pass easily in the US House of Representatives, will instruct the IRS to police how abortions are paid for:

To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans' "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act" would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they'd have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.

[...]

[D]uring Wednesday's hearing, Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) highlighted the IRS enforcement issue, which has until now flown under the radar. He asked:

Would a woman have to certify that the Health Savings Account funds she spent on birth control pills or for a doctor's visit weren't used to pay for an abortion? If a woman were audited, would IRS agents be at her house demanding court documents or affidavits proving that her pregnancy was the result of rape or incest?

Barthold replied that the taxpayer would have to prove that she had complied with all applicable abortion laws. Under standard audit procedure, a woman would have to provide evidence to corroborate facts about abortions, rapes, and cases of incest, says Marcus Owens, an accountant and former longtime IRS official. If a taxpayer received a deduction or tax credit for abortion costs related to a case of rape or incest, or because her life was endangered, then "on audit [she] would have to demonstrate or prove, ideally by contemporaneous written documentation, that it was incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger," Owens says. "It would be fairly intrusive for the woman."

Not everyone has "contemporaneous written documentation" that a pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. And, as Owens notes, adults sometimes pay for abortions for their children. If H.R. 3 becomes law, parents could face IRS questions about whether they spent pre-tax money from health savings accounts on abortions for their kids. "It would seem there would have to be a question about that [in an audit] and maybe even a question on the tax return," Owens says.

Read the whole Huffington Post article here (including several updates).

--Justin Snider's interview of Finland's Minister of Education, Henna Virkunnen, appears in the Huffington Post as Keys to Finnish Educational Success: Intensive Teacher-Training, Union Collaboration. In Finland, see, people want to be teachers, but only "the top students are offered the chance to become teachers." The interview explores why that is, and offers some sense of why Finland's educational system is so successful. It makes me want to cry, as I consider how privatization is destroying what is left of the US's existing educational system. I figure I may as well be reading about a fictional utopia. (And god, how I'd like to rub a few governors' noses in it.)

--Chris Rohman reviews Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire for the Valley Advocate. A snippet:

Hairston's work, on stage and page alike, insistently searches for signs that humans can overcome their divisions and oppressions, both external and self-inflicted. This book's geographical, emotional and spiritual journeys, spanning the early years of the 20th century, are odysseys of self-discovery and healing from wounds of the body and soul. The novel mirrors the eclectic, cross-cultural composition of the Chrysalis company and Hairston's own background—a multiracial poet-playwright-actor-musician-scholar who draws nourishment from diverse traditions.

--At Val Grimm's Portal, Jaymee Goh reviews Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things. The lengthy reviews begins thus:

The Universe of Things is a difficult anthology to review, since it is populated by some very difficult writing, and I don’t mean the language is hard to understand. By this, I mean that the stories are very challenging, and not straightforward at all. Gwyneth Jones’ writing is unsettling, which can be interpreted as a sign of her skill as a writer.

--And finally, don't forget to get a good look at tomorrow's "supermoon" (weather permitting). The moon will be both full and closer to the Earth than it has been for 18 years. This is from Space.com:

In a statement released Friday, noted NASA scientist Jim Garvin explains the mechanics behind the moon's phases and the causes of the supermoon. Garvin is the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"'Supermoon' is a situation when the moon is slightly closer to Earth in its orbit than on average, and this effect is most noticeable when it occurs at the same time as a full moon," Garvin wrote in the NASA statement. "So, the moon may seem bigger although the difference in its distance from Earth is only a few percent at such times." [Photos: Our Changing Moon]

The full moon of March will occur next Saturday on March 19, when the moon will be about 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away from Earth. The average distance between the Earth and the moon is about 238.000 miles (382.900 km).

"It is called a supermoon because this is a very noticeable alignment that at first glance would seem to have an effect," Garvin explained. "The 'super' in supermoon is really just the appearance of being closer, but unless we were measuring the Earth-Moon distance by laser rangefinders (as we do to track the LRO [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] spacecraft in low lunar orbit and to watch the Earth-Moon distance over years), there is really no difference."

Remember that WisCon panel on narrative politics?

The bad news is, I'm down sick, maybe with flu, and not feeling too thrilled to be sitting at my desk. The good news is, Narrative Power, the book that spun off a lively (some would even say contentious) WisCon 32 panel on narrative politics, has arrived here in Seattle (in time for Potlatch!), and I had the stuff posted below all prepared and ready to go in advance. (Which means-- big yay!-- I can crawl back into bed soon.) So here it is:

There is a reason for the existence of clichés: the easiest stories to tell and to listen to are the ones that everyone knows already, the ones that reinforce the listeners’ beliefs. The less sophisticated the listeners are – the younger the children – the less likely they are to tolerate change or ambiguity. A bedtime story about Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Richard will drive a three-year-old slightly bananas if she knows anything at all about The Tale of Peter Rabbit. (Parents: try this at home!)

Adults, as a rule, also like to hear the same stories, although they prefer that the stories have some differences – the human brain loves to detect differences. The popularity of familiar stories that reinforce the status quo is not limited to television and popular literature: historians repeat themselves.

Horatio-Alger stories thus become the narrative for male public figures who rise to success from poverty; for women, the story is more problematic, because female public figures are anomalous. In either case, the politics of the narrator inform the story being told. In narratives about women, as Joanna Russ has pointed out in her classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing, the narrator may simply deny that the woman actually accomplished anything worth noting. —from Eileen Gunn's introduction* to Narrative Power

Aqueduct Press will be releasing Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles, ed. by L. Timmel Duchamp, on March 15, 2010.

It is commonly said that history is written by the victors: the narrator chooses the events that will be part of the story, and the narrative explains their meaning. In fiction, narrative conventions and clichés make writing and reading familiar stories easier, but also impede writers’ efforts to tell unfamiliar stories. This volume asks: Is narrative inherently dangerous? Empowering? Or even liberating? A mix of established and new writers join several scholars in considering the politics of narrative manifested in fiction, history, and science.
________________________
*Eileen's full introduction has been reprinted in the Winter 2010 Aqueduct Gazette, available here.

Table of Contents

1. Going to Narrative: Introduction by Eileen Gunn

Part I. Narrative and History

2. Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Telling Reality: Why Narrative Fails Us”
3. L. Timmel Duchamp, “Lost in the Archives: A Shattered Romance”
4. Ellen E. Kittell, “Patriarchal Imperialism and the Narrative of Women’s History”
5. Rebecca Wanzo, “The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event”

Part II. Narrative Politics

6. Lesley A. Hall, “Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science”
7. Wendy Walker, “Imagination and Prison”
8. Lance Olsen, “Against Accessibility: Renewing the Difficult Imagination”
9. Alan DeNiro, “Reading The Best of A.E. Van Vogt”
10. Andrea Hairston, “Stories Are More Important Than Facts: Imagination as Resistance in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth”
11. Susan Palwick, “Suspending Disbelief: Story as a Political Catalyst”
12. Rebecca Wanzo, “Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality”

Part III. Narrative and Writing Fiction

13. Samuel R. Delany, “The Life of/and Writing”
14. Nicola Griffith, “Living Fiction and Storybook Lives”
15. Eleanor Arnason, “Narrative and Class”
16. Rachel Swirksy, “Why We Tell the Story”
17. Claire Light, “Girl in Landscape: How to Fall into a Politically Useless Narrative Rut and Notions of How to Get Back Out”

Take it from me, there are some really fascinating essays by some really smart people in this book. If you're at all interested in how stories work, this book is for you. And guess what? Following our usual practice, you can purchase copies of Narrative Power for the special pre-release price of $16 until April 1 (through Aqueduct's website only).

A few thoughts on agency and narrative

A book I edited, Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Strategies, currently at the printers, grew out of a lively, contentious panel at WisCon 32 on narrative politics; it offers essays by a lot of highly conscious writers as well as a some thoughtful scholars (viz., Eleanor Arnason, Samuel R. Delany, Alan DeNiro, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Nicola Griffith, Eileen Gunn, Andrea Hairston, Lesley A. Hall, Ellen E. Kittell, Claire Light, Lance Olsen, Susan Palwick, Rachel Swirsky, Wendy Walker, and Rebecca Wanzo). I may be done with the book, but I can't say the subject of narrative politics has released its hold on me. Last weekend when I read Dr. Franklin's Island by Gwyneth Jones writing as Ann Halam, I found myself pondering the conscious construction of a fantasy by the novel's two main characters that is based on a consensual lie. The novel is, of course, interesting for other reasons, but this particular moment in the novel struck me powerfully-- disproportionately so in relation to its importance to the overall story. I'd like to talk a bit about that, but first need to set up some backstory of my own to make that possible.

For conventional fiction, the prescribed narrative boils down to a protagonist (usually in the singular) facing a challenge and meeting it. In some forms of literary fiction, failure is an option, but not, usually, in science fiction (unless, of course, the failure results in some sort of tragedy, preferably apocalypse). If the main character is female, she's permitted to be passive and rescued, especially if her rescue coincides with her getting the boy (though some people, particularly feminists like those of us who hang out on this blog, won't find such a narrative satisfying). Agency, that is to say, is essential for lead male characters, but not so much female characters. This narrative imperative is the reason why Sully, in Avatar, must according to the rules of conventional narrative be endowed with the cosmic specialness that makes him the leader in a situation where he should, logically, be the leader's helper.

Agency has always been an issue for writers of feminist sf. Back in 1972, Joanna Russ articulated some of the problems in her article, "What Can A Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write." But looking further back, I suspect that most women writing sf have grappled with how to create and depict active female characters (rather than damsels in distress)-- characters able to survive the depredations of readers' gender politics. Female agency, of course, can be found in the early years of sf. C.L.Moore's Jirel of Joiry offers a strong example of a female character who exercises agency (and is therefore powerful). But Jirel is the antagonist of the stories in which she appears rather than the protagonist. (Because yes, Virginia, it's easier to create powerful female antagonists than powerful female protagonists...)

Although female agency has always been important to women writers (think of Christine de Pisan!), it became profoundly important to second-wave feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least partly in reaction to the examples and images of female subordination that had become so constantly present in the movement as a result of, on the one hand the anti-pornography/anti-violence-against-women wing of the movement (later known as "cultural feminism") and, on the other hand, somewhat ironically, the underside of consciousness-raising, which was all about women confronting their subordination and oppression in order to take charge of their own lives. The images and attitudes of 1960s and early 1970s US culture were more overwhelmingly sexist than anyone who wasn't around for it could possibly imagine, and so exposing and naming the pervasive effects of sexism was the first step to agency. But if memory serves me, some cultural feminists got so tightly focused on the facts and machinery of subordination (and its apparent totalization in US culture) that they couldn't believe any female agency was possible for as long as the sexist system remained in place.

In reaction to cultrual feminism's essentialism and (in my view, anyway, negativity and ressentiment), other feminists devoted themselves to identifying and celebrating women's agency wherever they looked. The effects of this strategy were on the whole excellent since it enabled women to insert themselves back into history and see themselves as actively involved in making the world they live in. Equally importantly, it enabled white women to see the intersectionality of oppressions and, consequently, their own privilege. (Much of the Marq'ssan Cycle is about this, which is not very surprising, I suppose, given its date of composition.) At the same time, I can't deny that agency also became something of a fetish for feminists, with sometimes ridiculous results, as feminist scholars used elaborate casuistry to establish a claim for agency in unlikely and even inappropriate situations, producing a narrative about an ugly situation that doesn't make them intolerably uncomfortable. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that a weird sort of morality has developed in which it is de rigueur for feminist analysis to locate some sort of exercise of agency in every situation, as though not finding and recognizing agency in some way disses the woman seen to lack it. The results of such a moral imperative can on occasion be grotesque.

I can think of several times in my own life that I've knowingly lied when asserting that doing such and such was my own choice and desire--claiming an exercise of agency where there was, in fact, none-- when instead I'd felt coerced or without real choice and was simply acquiescing to the situation. In one of those instances, I simply lacked the stomach for the fight it would have taken to resist. In another case, resistance would have entailed serious damage to myself or others. In a couple of other instances, I wasn't quick-witted enough to make a choice when I had the opportunity so that when the window of opportunity closed, and it was too late to do otherwise, I made a show of embracing the default. Claiming in each case that the choice was mine served various social-psychological purposes (that I didn't consciously consider at the time), most of them to do with my self-respect and pride. I suspect that claiming agency where none was exerted is all about a certain moral psychology.

As I mentioned when I began this, a passage in Dr. Franklin's Island impelled me along this train of thought. Semi and Miranda, teenagers who have washed up from a plane wreck on an island owned by eponymous mad scientist in the title, are prisoners lying under full-body restraint in strait jackets, on the eve of being submitted to surgery that will genetically re-engineer their bodies in radical and shocking ways. As the narrator, Semi, is about to "start screaming and screaming," Miranda says, "her voice...a light I could follow, like the little glowing lights that led to the emergency exit" (on the plane):

"List, Semi. This experiment is exciting. Exciting, do you hear? Say it.

"Exciting, I whispered. I didn't understand, but I was trusting her with my life."

"We're going to be made more than human, we're going to have superpowers."

"I want to go home."

"Well, you can't go home. That's over that's out. So concentrate on the adventure....We're going to imagine we've volunteered for this. The stratjackets are to... to keep our muscles rested, before the operation. We've volunteered, and now we have to be brave, really brave and tough. That sounds good, doesn't it? Doesn't it sound good? I like the idea of being brave."

"We're going to die."

"Yes," she said, with a shake in her voice. Probably. But we don't have to die screaming. Let's go for quality of life? For believing anything that makes us feel better? Come on, Semi. Try it."

The tactic works. They get through the night. And after the surgery, Semi continues to use the tactic. She isn't fooling herself, but rather is creating a sort of antidote to the mental effects of helplessness-- which Jones makes brilliantly clear is a survival strategy. Vis-a-vis the narrative, of course, Semi and Miranda do manage to save themselves and crush Dr. Franklin. But it's clear that until they are in a position to actually exercise agency, they need to cultivate a state of mind that makes that exercise of agency possible for that moment when they discover a break in the walls of their imprisonment.

All of which leads me to think we need a term for that particular state of mind, a term recognizing that it's not the same as an exercise of agency, but that it is nevertheless not passivity. We need to acknowledge, in other words, that agency is not a toggle switch that's either off or on.

To go back to narrative politics: maybe we need a different way to think about agency in narrative. I think Dr. Franklin's Island would have been a different story if Jones hadn't depicted her characters coping with total entrapment in this way. Until this point in the book they'd been vigorous in their efforts to survive (both before and after capture by Dr. Franklin). And a bit later, they become active again. But depicting their mental activity in the face of forced inaction in effect insists that exercising agency doesn't simply comes naturally to certain people, but requires a certain kind of work that makes an exercise agency, in the right circumstances, possible.

Lois McMaster Bujold Talks about Genre

Lois McMaster Bujold has posted her Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech here. In it she offers some interesting thoughts about genre(s). To start with, I certainly find her definition of "genre" congenial:

Although I don't dare a definition for our genres specifically, I do have a definition for genres generally. To my mind, a genre is "any group of works in close conversation with one another". I like this definition for its inclusiveness -- because there are genres in painting and architecture and music and a host of other human arts as well. This is also a working definition with the emphasis on the working part, genre from the creators' point of view.

There is a second definition of genre, from the reader's point of view, which may be described as a "community of taste", closely allied to but not quite the same as the first. Writers by nature have a foot in both camps, creator and audience -- we do not go into the sometimes-maddening trade of writing because we are indifferent to books, but because we are ravished by them.

There is yet a third definition for genre, confused, as are many terms in the English language, by being attached to the same word, which is: genre as a marketing category, signified by all those labeled sections in the bookstore. Such labels had to be invented as soon as there became too many books for any one person to sort through in a reasonable amount of time, which turns out to be longer ago than I'd thought -- certainly well back into the 19th Century, and possibly as little as 15 minutes after Mr. Gutenberg's invention. These categories are a welcome and necessary convenience, when they aren't perceived as more than that. But when genre labels in this sense start being used as counters in status games, or become walls dividing readers from books rather than doors leading to them, such labels can become toxic.

And, she notes:

Our genre conversation is a chaotic system, full of weird covert feedback loops and odd links to outside forces. Any idea of consciously directing it to some utilitarian end seems as wrong-headed to me as the notion of the writer as the heroic lone creator, a picture held and advanced by many non-writers, which is an outright lie, and evil insofar as it is taught to children. I know of no writer or other artist anywhere who hasn't come out of some context of other artists and a supporting community, with its own conversation -- or argument -- even though those contexts are usually edited out of the historical picture for simplicity. And I have deep misgivings about various attempts to rank art by its social utility. So while I may applaud for style various earnest attempts to direct Movements in SF, I have no belief that they will ever succeed in getting this herd of cats to the railhead in Abilene. And anyway, I was heading to Albuquerque. (Yes, that is a Bugs Bunny reference, for any who were in doubt.)

A bit more unexpectedly, Bujold advances this interesting claim, which she situates as flowing from her recent experience of writing a blend of Romance and SF:

There are indeed problems for this Odd Couple partnership between SF and Romance, but subtly not, or not only, the ones I necessarily thought. I certainly learned some lessons about how genre boundaries are maintained not only by publishers but by their readerships. And I'd long been aware of our genres' allergy to the domestic, with rare exceptions like the stories of Zenna Henderson. But it also brought up an element I'd actually played with in my earlier SF, about the peculiar tensions in Our Stuff between the personal and the political.

I expected to learn a lot about romance through writing one, and I did. I was more surprised to learn something new to me about fantasy and science fiction -- which is how profoundly, intensely, relentlessly political most of the stories in these genres are. The politics may be archaic or modern, fringe or realistic, naive or subtle, optimistic or dire, but by gum the characters had better be centrally engaged with them, for some extremely varied values of "engaged". Even the world-building itself is often a political argument. And, oh boy, are the political aspects of the fiction ever valorized in the reviews. I had not noticed this the way a fish does not notice water. Only when I'd stepped onto the shore of the neighboring genre and breathed a contrasting air did I discover there even could be a difference -- and what a difference it was.

Romance and SF seemed to occupy two different focal planes, to steal another metaphor, this time from photography. For any plot to stay central, nothing else in the book can be allowed to be more important. So romance books carefully control the scope of any attending plot, so as not to overshadow its central concern, that of building a relationship between the key couple, one that will stand the test of time and be, in whatever sense, fruitful. This also explains some SF's addiction to various end-of-the-world plots, for surely nothing could be more important than that, which conveniently allows the book to dismiss all other possible concerns, social, personal, or other. (Nice card trick, that, but now I've seen it slipped up the sleeve I don't think it'll work on me anymore.)

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines "win" in romances, the way detectives "win" in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters "win" in adventure tales. But now that I've noticed the politics in SF, they seem to be everywhere, like packs of little yapping dogs trying to savage your ankles. Not universally, thank heavens -- there are wonderful lyrical books such as The Last Unicorn or other idiosyncratic tales that escape the trend. But certainly in the majority of books, to give the characters significance in the readers' eyes means to give them political actions, with "military" read here as a sub-set of political.

Comments, anyone?

Different meanings of 'strong'

Among the many issues raised by the Wiscon panel on feminist foremothers in sff, one that resonated with something I had already been mulling over was the one about the 'strong woman character'. Quite often there seems to be a segue from the idea of a strong character in the sense of one who is written in such a way as to interest and engage the reader (sense A) to the notion of a character who has to manifest some (rather stereotyped?) notion of 'strong' (sense B).

What is meant by 'strong' anyway? I'd been thinking for some time about the tendency of writers to put in 'strong woman characters' in sense B, who are very far from being strong characters in sense A. These are usually women in some non-typical female role (leatherclad ninja amazon bodyguard, daring guerilla fighter, ship's captain): but they don't actually do anything. They're just set-dressing. Or, if they do do anything it is simply for plot purposes to facilitate the endeavours of a central male character(s).

The whole question of 'strong woman characters' generates troubling questions about what is strength in women - is it only women-in-roles-traditionally-conceived of as male who can qualify, and does strength in more traditionally female forms, for example as a matriarch, simply replicate longstanding stereotypes, or get dismissed as the kind of stock trope that figures in female and/or domestic fiction.

When women in sff are depicted in more traditional roles they often have a distressing lack of agency: this tends to be excused on the grounds that 'that is what it would be like for women in a society like that'. The remedy for this is to go away and read some history, both biographies of specific women of the past and works such as Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter, Norma Clarke's several studies of networks of women writers and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a whole range of works both recent and older (Alice Clark's and Ivy Pinchbeck's pioneering studies are still worth reading) that demonstrate the fallacy of simplistic notions of 'separate spheres'.

There are also issues about what constitutes a strong character in sense A: are fictional characters who are already shining exemplars of certain qualities particularly interesting, does the reader empathise and engage with them? More flawed, less perfect, conflicted, struggling characters who make mistakes or fail to do the right thing at the right time, characters who are questions rather than answers, are surely 'stronger' in this sense because more vivid, more interesting.

Literature is full of characters who remain in the memory even if the author is not setting them up as models to be imitated. Sometimes, indeed, they are meant to be an awful warning. But they are memorable because even if they are not the hero or the heroine, they are written in such a way that they have lives of their own beyond any plot-function they may be serving. They are not just a reward for the hero's quest or a self-sacrificing sidekick.

Perhaps we need another word than 'strong', with its potential for blurring the boundaries between these entirely different things, to describe this?

Gender Differences and the Pleasures of the Text

Every time the issue of gender disparities in our genre’s publications comes up, I reflect on how complicated a phenomenon it is and how many different ways there are to address, explain, or engage with it. My own approach usually combines Susan Winnett’s observations in her famous 1990 article in PMLA, “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,” and my own understanding of discursive politics. The fact that we don’t have a single, intelligible way to talk about the problem is probably one of the reasons that we keep approaching it so clumsily and from such different angles. And as Winnett says,

Considering the last decade’s preoccupations with sexual difference and the pleasure of the text, it is surprising that theories concerned with the relation between narrative and pleasure have largely neglected to raise the issue of the difference between women’s and men’s reading pleasures. But this question seems to require critical tools that, for reasons I explore in this essay, have not been available. Indeed, the same analytic paradigms that give us professional access to texts have already determined the terms in which we accede to, comply with, or resist the coercions of a cultural program for pleasure that is not interested in---and whose interests may be threatened by---the difference of women’s pleasure.

Winnett is, of course, talking about the texts of capital-L Literature that is the usual object of scholarly literary criticism. But it seems to me that a large part of the problem we have talking about the differences in our genre is that, indeed, the terms in which the argument is cast are always those of the status quo and for that reason simply won’t be made to---maybe even can’t---accommodate the interests of women writers and fans. Of course, Winnett wrote that article back in 1990, and it immediately became one of the “critical tools” used by feminist critics to talk about the problem and has since been cited innumerable times by feminist critics exploring narrative politics. But seventeen years later, I don’t see that that’s made much difference to the literary critical establishment as a whole (which is, after all, still dominated by white men).

The opening of Winnett’s article, which immediately foregrounds women’s pleasure, is not only provocative, but also (as later unfolds) perfectly appropriate:

I would like to begin with the proposition that female orgasm is unnecessary. I am not, of course, saying that it is unnecessary to any particular woman that she experience orgasm or, for that matter, to any particular man that his female partner do so; rather, I mean that women’s orgasm and, by extension, women’s pleasure can be extraneous to that culmination of heterosexual desire which is copulation. Women’s pleasure can take place outside, or independent of, the male sexual economy whose pulsations determine the dominant culture, its repressions, its taboos, and its narratives, as well as the “human sciences” developed to explain them.

Winnett then describes male arousal and ejaculation in strictly visual terms and observes that narratology takes Freud’s “Masterplot” as the model for understanding narrative structure and asks “If they were conscious that the narrative dynamics and the erotics of reading they were expounding were specifically tied to an ideology of representation derivable only from the dynamics of male sexuality, would they not at least feel uncomfortable making general statements about ‘narrative,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘us’?” But, she says, on encountering a passage by Robert Scholes (from “The Orgiastic Pattern of Fiction”), she realized that asking such a question was simply naïve. She quotes Scholes:

The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act. In saying this I do not mean merely to remind the reader of the connection between all art and the erotic in human nature….For what connects fiction---and music---with sex is the fundamental orgiastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.

Scholes, in other words, insists that the structure of male orgasm is the one correct (and universal!) structure of artistic creation. Winnett remarks: “Even if we have become wary of the generic ‘man in society,’ we still might need to be reminded that such generalizations in such contexts indicate that the pleasure the reader is expected to take in the text is the pleasure of the man.”

We hear all the time in our genre, of course, that many men simply do not read anything they know to be written by a woman yet most women read without gender discrimination. (Obviously there are exceptions to this generalization, but it’s largely true and therefore meaningful to the discussion.) So what happens when men can’t take pleasure in certain texts written by women that many women take inordinate pleasure in? It’s obvious what happens, because I encounter this happening all the time (and not just with my own work or with the books I edit and publish for Aqueduct): the male critic or editor or fan reading them judge them boring, or clumsy, or dull, or inept---or “girly.” Such readers may well praise some work by women because often women writers choose to conform to the male sexual “Masterplot” of narrative. But they will be quick to dismiss (often with contempt) anything that they personally can’t understand or relate to with pleasure. As Winnett says,

For the male critic, the sexual pleasure of reading would seem to take place within a nexus of homosocial arrangements in which ‘the marriage of true minds’ is an affair ‘between men,’ as Eve Sedgwick has put it. In this system, woman is neither an independent subjectivity nor a desiring agent but, rather, an enabling position organizing the social fiction of heterosexuality. In its honest outrageousness, Scholes’s erotics of reading makes clearer than does Brook’s more subtle articulation that the patriarchy has a simultaneously blind and enlightened investment both in the forms of its pleasure and in its conscious valorization and less conscious mystification of them. And this realization does nothing but make it all the more frightening to contemplate the obstacles our own education has placed in the way both of women’s conceiving (of) their own pleasure and of men’s conceding that female pleasure might have a different plot.

Winnett shows how a narrative structure based on women’s pleasure might be delineated (and uses Shelley’s Frankenstein to do so). Perhaps I ought to note that she is not claiming that narrative should necessarily be understood as morphologically mimicking orgasmic pleasure (male or female): “I of course do not think that textual production and narrative dynamics are matters of sexuality alone…” In fact, in the second part of her article she challenges the dominant emphasis on narrative form (or narrative arc, which is how writers typically talk about it) as she notes that Scholes considers the sort of relations that interest women “merely thematic” (and not very interesting: Scholes dismisses as “situational-thematic” (for examples) “the role of mothers and daughters, situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth”), meaning that they can’t be recuperated within the structure of the narrative form (the way every aspect of the Oedipal plot naturally is). Scholes, by the way, chides feminist critics for spending so much time on what he sees as extraneous aspects of narrative.

“Situational-thematic”: Yes, this designation covers all the sorts of relations that tend to fascinate women when explored in fiction. And it denotes, I think, what Angry Black Women means by the “girl [or vagina] story.”

In sum, if you’re interested in why this difference in taste and perception of quality is so hard to talk about productively, it’s definitely worth your time to get hold of the article and read it.