Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Early on in an opinion-piece about what women’s writing is and ought to be (h/t), Rachel Cusk writes:

When a woman in 2010 sits down to write, she perhaps feels rather sexless. She is inclined neither to express nor deny: she’d rather be left alone to get on with it. She might even nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of ”women’s writing”. Why should she be politicised when she doesn’t feel politicised? It may even, with her, be a point of honour to keep those politics as far from her prose as it is possible to get them.

That “perhaps” isn’t there to weaken the writing: it’s there to mark the whole passage as speculation so that she can wiggle away from providing any actual examples. She, of course, does not know what any other woman feels when she sits down to write. There are certainly, however, many contemporary writers whose writing shows a clear awareness of their being women and of the experience of womanhood. I just finished reading Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows which is at its core the story of one woman’s life from the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki to post-9/11 New York. The novel explores storylines that follow the men she has been connected with but always returns to her situation, experience, and perspective. Then there’s Margaret Atwood, of whom Cusk surely is not unaware; could anyone account for Atwood’s work within hostility towards “women’s writing”?

So why is Cusk making such unsupported claims about women writers? Simple: she has fallen into the trap of either/or thinking and essentialism. After acknowledging that women now on occasion win literary awards, she states

But it seems to me that ”women’s writing” by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

Compare this statement with what Alicia Suskin Ostriker has to say in Feminist Revision and the Bible:

The choice between “difference” and “similarity” is one of those false choices proposed by phallogocentric logic which we should reject. Women are both similar to men and different from them. Shouldn’t that be obvious to anyone who hasn’t been brainwashed. Likewise our writing both resembles and deviates from men’s writing.

Ostriker is another writer whose work clearly engages with the experience of womanhood, though given that Cusk has specifically mentioned prose and Ostriker writes poetry, perhaps her work is out of bounds for discussion. At any rate, Cusk’s either/or thinking leads directly to an essentialist definition of women’s writing:

She can look at her own body: if a woman’s body signifies anything, it is that repetition is more powerful than change. But change is more wondrous, more enjoyable. It is more pleasant to write the book of change than the book of repetition. In the book of change one is free to consider absolutely anything, except that which is eternal and unvarying. ”Women’s writing” might be another name for the book of repetition.

My body doesn’t only repeat but also changes: I have menstrual cycles and I have a different face today than I had at twenty. Repetition is important (I’m now fairly certain that Cusk doesn’t read contemporary poetry), but I don’t think my period is more powerful than the way my joys and pains begin, slowly, to mark my face. Besides which, while my body is part of my every experience and should not be denied, it is not the limit of the shapes of my experience, nor should it be the limit of my writing. (Cusk has, perhaps, conflated sex and gender.) And then one has to ask how trans women fit into this. Or women who have had hysterectomies. Cusk has no place for them.

In fact, in the end, Cusk has place only for a very narrow definition of woman:

And in my own experience as a writer, it is in the places where honesty is most required – because it is here that compromise and false consciousness and ”mystification” continue to endanger the integrity of a woman’s life – that it is most vehemently rejected. I am talking, of course, about the book of repetition, about fiction that concerns itself with what is eternal and unvarying, with domesticity and motherhood and family life. The sheer intolerance, in 2010, for these subjects is the unarguable proof that woman is on the verge of surrendering important aspects of her modern identity.

In fact, the categories of woman and mother overlap but are not identical. Domesticity and family life are anything but ahistorical. Their shapes shift as society changes and creates new demands.

Rachel Cusk is right about one thing, however: at present there is no easily identifiable “women’s writing”. She’s wrong in thinking that’s a problem. What we should be striving for instead is to have women’s writings encompassing diverse styles and subjects from which we can discover not only how we are both similar to and different from men and people who have non-binary identities but also how we are both similar to and different from each other.

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In the wake of the recent mistreatment of Caster Semenya, there has been some discussion of whether dividing sports based on sex or gender is really appropriate. Most of this debate has focused on how it effects elite athletes such as Ms. Semenya. While this makes sense when talking about the Olympics, World Championships, and professional sports, these are not the only organizations which segregate athletes based on gender or sex. The question of the gender divide needs to consider school and recreation leagues, and the less-skilled athletes who play in them, as well.

On a surface level, it might seem that eliminating this division would benefit less-skilled male athletes and harm less-skilled female athletes. Speaking as a woman who was one of the slowest girls on her high school swim team, however, I am not sure that’s true. The fastest girls on my team were so far beyond me in terms of times, that I doubt adding the boys into the mix (as long as there were more heats to accommodate larger numbers of participants) would have made much of a difference for me. (Note that for swim team we did not have a junior varsity team, only exhibition heats during the regular meets.)

The summer league I swam for did more to ensure equal levels of competition. In addition to sex-based divisions, there were “A” and “B” meets; which one you swam in depended upon your times. If instead of dividing age groups based on two factors, they had simply made four time-based divisions, would it have been any less fair? I don’t think so.

Indeed, my gender had far less to do with my slow times than the amount of training I did (most of the best swimmers did year-round competition) and certain physical characteristics such as height and arm-length. If any of these factors were used in place of gender to divide young athletes, there would be more opportunities for the non-elite athletes among us to compete in events we have a chance at winning.

To function in society as an autistic person, I have to tolerate and sometimes even participate in activities and preferences that I do not understand. This does not mean that I do things that go against my sense of ethics; a good (but by definition trivial) example would be small talk. I treat it the way you might treat a foreign country’s customs (if you are a respectful visitor, that is). As that comparison may suggest, I do not always get it right. When I get it wrong, there are consequences: maybe I don’t make a good impression in a job interview, for example. Rarely am I given an explanation of what I have done wrong and what I should have done, let alone any indication of why.

While I am not typically considered to be entitled to an explanation of how to be respectful and considerate of neurotypicals, it is common to see or hear demands for detailed reasons behind the actions of marginalized groups. How often do cis people insist that trans people fully explain what it means to have a gendered identity (as if cis folk like me don’t have one) as a prerequisite to being treated with respect? (Though of course it’s rarely spelled out like that.)

Ultimately, this dichotomy has its roots in the nature of normativity. If you do not fit the norm, you are expected to strive to become like the norm unless you can plead your case for why your deviations should be considered acceptable. It may seem as if it should then be acceptable for someone to ask about what is considered the norm. The reason it is not is that when the norm is described, it becomes subject to discourse and inquiry. It loses its power to function invisibly, and the people who fit inside its boundaries face the risk of losing their privilege.

The first time I read through Evie Shockley’s socially and geographically aware love poem, quiet as it’s kept, I found myself searching for evidence that the description of “these boys” was ironic or for some sort of sinister presence behind their surfaces. This probably says more about my own experiences (up until the past couple years anyway) than it does about the poem, but two specific phrases contributed to this reaction and ultimately provided me with a way to grasp the poem’s non-ironic content.

The first of these is the second part of the first line: “their quiet feminism”. My initial response to this was to wonder what good their feminism was if they didn’t speak out. This is answered later on: the good is in their actions, in their being

the boys who open doors for men
                                                 and
                                                         women

A loud feminist man or boy who doesn’t treat people kindly and equally is just “feminist”.

The second phrase that led me to doubt “these boys” comes in the second line: “in their mothers’ gardens”. I thought of young men sheltered and protected by their mothers, who may even remain good and caring so long as they are in that context, who either cannot handle life without a mother-figure serving their needs or who turn cruel when denied that. The phrase around this one, however, make it clear that this garden is only a starting point:

no one tells you about these boys  :  their quiet feminism
grows like wildflowers  :  in their mothers’ gardens

If your neighbor has ever planted a patch of wildflowers by your well-manicured landscape, then you know that such plants never stay where they begin.

While my initial assumption that there must be irony proved incorrect, there is a sinister presence in the poem. It is not part of boys but, rather, the external world, the winter chill responsible for

oooooooooooooooooothe ice freezing silently
over your private spring

It is the potentially deadly chill of a profoundly anti-feminist—anti-woman—society.

This interpretation is supported by the repetition of “no one tells you”. A society frozen against egalitarian loves isn’t about to tell you about the existence of boys who can engage in such relationships or about how to build these relationships. Relationships that do not fit the social norms require learning a whole new way to be together. It isn’t just that no one does tell you: it’s that no one can.

By contrast, a second repeating element emphasizes the possibility of an egalitarian connection. The colon connects clauses in a way that allows one to elucidate or flow from the other without being subordinated.

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If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I have nothing but harsh words for the vaccines-cause-autism crew. When I started seeing people who have never spoken out against Autism Speaks or CNN shows that have given Jenny McCarthy a platform criticizing Oprah for hosting her, however, I started to get a knot in my stomach*. Indeed, the absolute virulence displayed in this comments thread at Bad Astronomer shows that my discomfort was there for a reason.

Oprah makes an easier target than, say, Larry King (who has also had guests like Jenny McCarthy on), even though one would think that his show being on a news network would mean that he would be held to a higher standard. As a woman of color, Oprah has achieved power, popularity, and wealth that the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism say she does not deserve. Because of this, people who believe (even unconsciously) that their race and/or sex entitles them to more than she has already resent her. That she would give a platform to someone promoting medical quackery gives such individuals an excuse to let their resentment show. Another reason she makes an easy target is who we perceive her audience to be: if you look again at that comment thread, you will see a lot of references to uneducated, non-wealthy women who follow Oprah without engaging in critical thought. These are women that we, as a society, already hold in contempt because of their socioeconomic position.

To be clear, I am not saying that Oprah should be exempt from criticism. What I am saying is that 

1. Criticism should stay on topic and not take a nasty, personal tone. 
2. If Oprah is the only media figure you criticize for giving anti-vaccination campaigners a voice, you’re doing something wrong.

*No, not everyone speaking out against Oprah has otherwise been silent; if I’m not talking about you then I’m not talking about you.

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