tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post7496647057913855733..comments2024-03-03T13:55:46.243-08:00Comments on Ambling Along the Aqueduct: Gender Differences and the Pleasures of the TextTimmi Duchamphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-85392537154658666912013-10-10T09:42:00.129-07:002013-10-10T09:42:00.129-07:00Timmi,
Thank you for this post. I am currently con...Timmi,<br />Thank you for this post. I am currently conducting an analysis of this essay and your notes have really helped me to clarify the intention of Winnett's criticism. I am very inspired by this article, and find myself illuminated on the structure of the narrative in relation to male pleasure. Even the ways we, as students, are taught to write creatively (with an introduction, a problem, a climax, and a resolution) are evident in the gender bias that Winnett is exposing here. It is very interesting to consider.Reagan Reynoldshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08773718253580988986noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-48342290584868302682007-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:002007-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:00Exactly so, Ted. Thanks so much for pointing this ...Exactly so, Ted. Thanks so much for pointing this out. (I've now corrected it.)Timmi Duchamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-66238382557570439642007-05-20T12:15:00.000-07:002007-05-20T12:15:00.000-07:00We hear all the time in our genre, of course, that...<I>We hear all the time in our genre, of course, that many women simply do not read anything they know to be written by a woman yet most women read without gender discrimination.</I><BR/><BR/>I think there's a typo in this sentence; shouldn't it be "many <I>men</I> simply do not read anything they know to be written by a woman"?Tedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00799259633965559067noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-53986019419104808562007-05-19T11:07:00.000-07:002007-05-19T11:07:00.000-07:00Ooops-- I should never post at two o'clock in the ...Ooops-- I should never post at two o'clock in the morning. It wasn't eleven years ago, but nine. Sorry about that!Timmi Duchamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-27103940841127576912007-05-19T02:14:00.000-07:002007-05-19T02:14:00.000-07:00Well, my post is talking about reading & ways of w...Well, my post is talking about reading & ways of writing. Do you think talking about that, per se, is a waste of time? That's a little hard on feminists who want to spend their time writing and reading fiction. Writers, especially, tend to think it's important to pay attention to the politics of narrative. I like to think, myself, that years of thinking about these things has allowed me to find new stories to tell that are truer to the world we live in than the ones that come "naturally" & just fall into the same old cliches & stereotypes.<BR/><BR/>In any case, it's a little hard to know what you mean by "ascribing narratives to 'genders'." Neither Winnett nor I am doing that, Ide, so I'm having trouble figuring out what you mean. Brook’s Oedipal Masterplot, I would say, is essentialist---but you will note, he says there's only one <I>real</I> narrative, the Oedipal narrative. (Narratives about mothers and daughters, for instance, are extraneous and thus not true narratives.) In opposing it, Winnett says that there are many other ways to talk about narrative than the Masterplot that both Brook & Scholes say is the only real narrative. Do you think that’s essentialist? I certainly don’t. As Winnett writes: “The existence of two models implies to me the possibility of many more; neither the schemes I am criticizing nor the one I develop here exhausts the possibilities offered by the psychoanalytic mode. Work, class, law, politics, ambition, domination, power, and geography—issues that involve gender but not necessarily sexuality—represent compelling and theoretically productive motivations for narrative outside a psycholanalytic paradigm that sees them as dramatizations of sexual drives.” <BR/><BR/>Winnett is, in short, arguing that there are many other ways to read than by way of the simple binary that Brook & Scholes set up as the standard for literary criticism. As far as I’m concerned, an opposition to binary thinking is anti-essentialist. Unless you have something else in mind? (The definition of “essentialism,” of course has been unstable since us second-wave feminists first started using the term. So for all I know, by “essentialism” you mean something other than dualistic thinking.)<BR/><BR/>& of course as you may have noticed, when I talked about these problems playing out in our genre, I noted that reading & writing practices don’t fall out along strict gender lines. But the fact is, narratives that aren’t intelligible by most men are labeled “girlie” & deemed “uninteresting” & often trivial (even when they’re very powerful works). The lack of intelligibility, as far as I’m concerned, is the real problem: it’s the men & the women who share the men’s criteria for determining what is interesting who reject the stories that don’t conform, not the women who read & write such stories who reject the boy stories. (Note that women have no trouble understanding the texts that conform to the male standard & wouldn’t dream of dissing them. It's an asymmetircal relation.) Is my pointing out this problem “essentialist”? <BR/><BR/>As for <I>What Are We Fighting For</I>, yes, I read that eleven years ago & have quoted from it often in my essays & articles. (I couldn’t seem to get anyone else to read it back then, though. I’m glad to hear that you've read it.) No question in my mind Joanna Russ would appreciate Winnett’s article. You could fairly characterize it as talking about what Russ in another place calls “Outsider Literature”—all the stuff that doesn’t fit the dominant—Oedipal, according to Brook—paradigm. & since Russ also suggests that a solution to the difficulties women writers have using male narrative forms is an employment of lyricism, I would say that she’s long been aware of the problem Winnett is trying to describe in her article.Timmi Duchamphttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00673465487533328661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5360814020056871156.post-19613938377398823802007-05-19T00:51:00.000-07:002007-05-19T00:51:00.000-07:00That's essentialism dressed up in fancy talk. Hone...That's essentialism dressed up in fancy talk. Honestly. It's no wonder you can't get anywhere if you start by conjuring away the power dynamics of oppression and then ascribe narratives to "genders" as separate groups capable of existing independently of their relationship to each other.<BR/><BR/>You'd do better to have a look at the Afterword to Joanna Russ's <I>How To Suppress Women's Writing</I>. (And you'll get a gold star from some people for getting me to tell you that.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com