Recently in gender Category
Dear Hegemony, please tell me who I am. Please tell me how to see myself.
We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.
And how generous Hegemony is with its answers! Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week.
David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier." Just in passing, mind you. It's not his focus; it's an aside.
But pause. Let that sink in. So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier? Do women in general, David Denby? (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?) Is that true of male actors, of men?
On to #2. Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities. His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker. He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale. He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college.
Hegemony. Money. The metropole.
Why does this matter to you, writers? Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper. His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.
So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires. It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece." Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown. Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:
Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s. The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius.
How backward, we all said.
Yet here we go again, in 2010. (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)
Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway. Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page. (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.) Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.
But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.
We've just been reading Wide Sargasso Sea in class, so my mind's on how a dominant voice--backed by money and the power of the metropole--can erase and madden someone else's truth.
And how generous Hegemony is with its answers! Here are just two that scratched their fingernails across my brain this week.
David Denby, reviewing Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer in the March 8, 2010 New Yorker, refers in passing--admiringly--to Olivia Williams "one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier." Just in passing, mind you. It's not his focus; it's an aside.
But pause. Let that sink in. So . . . the majority of actresses, then, seem more stupid and ugly as they get angrier? Do women in general, David Denby? (Is it any wonder that so many women have trouble expressing anger directly?) Is that true of male actors, of men?
On to #2. Nathaniel Rich, who turns all of 30 tomorrow, is perhaps surprisingly young to be the senior editor of fiction at The Paris Review, but then, he's had unusual opportunities. His father is Frank Rich, who writes for the New York Times; his brother Simon writes humor for the New Yorker. He grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Yale. He worked at the New York Review of Books straight out of college.
Hegemony. Money. The metropole.
Why does this matter to you, writers? Well, at the Paris Review, a most desirable publication venue for any writer, Nathaniel Rich serves as the decider, the gatekeeper. His taste determines what gets into the journal's pages.
So I found it rather fascinating to stumble across this window into his desires. It appeared in Canteen Magazine this January in what Rich's own website describes as "an autobiographical nonfiction piece." Its title, "Over Ernest," suggests that it's looking back at youthful folly; that the author's early infatuation with Hemingway is now outgrown. Still, its opening paragraph is fascinating:
While being fellated by a native woman.There was a time—not as long ago as I’d like to believe—when I imagined all novelists as Ernest Hemingways, hero-adventurers who shot tigers, fought in wars, seduced wild-eyed women, gambled their life savings at high-stakes poker, won duels, lost duels, and wrote frantic bursts of prose while standing upright in their rented rooms in Havana or Saigon or Beirut. I didn’t fully understand the standing-upright part, but I had read that Hemingway worked this way. At first I figured it had something to do with the immense ferocity of the act; surely he was too wired with genius to sit down at a desk. The more I thought about it, though, it occurred to me that the reason Hemingway wrote standing up was to allow a woman (his muse, no doubt) to more easily “inspire” him while he was in the midst of his demanding labor. This image—of the great writer madly scribbling masterpieces while being fellated by a native woman—haunted me. If this was the writing life, who wouldn’t want to be a writer? . . . I had just turned 21 years old.
Gentle readers, we recently read and discussed in class an excerpt from Madwoman in the Attic, that groundbreaking work of feminist criticism from the 1970s. The students were shocked by the wildly sexist things that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers said about the blood-congested male drive they saw as essential to writing works of literary genius.
How backward, we all said.
Yet here we go again, in 2010. (Hey, it's working for Avatar.)
Okay, so Nathaniel Rich was young and oversexed when he fantasized about Hemingway. Okay, so surely the essay will later take his younger self to task--I couldn't tell, because Canteen only excerpts the first page. (Invited to read more--by subscribing, at $10 an issue--gee, I declined.) Okay, so it was 9 whole years ago.
But not as long ago as I'd like to believe.
Categories:
If you'll be in Lincoln this weekend, consider attending the screening of the award-winning documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, with a discussion led afterward by a local psychologist who does trauma work with survivors. Filmmaker Lisa Jackson, a survivor of gang rape herself, has won multiple awards for her documentaries over the past 30 years.
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
This particular film is the one that led the UN in 2008 to classify rape as a weapon of war.
It screens at the Ross, which is hosting the film festival Women Make Movies: Women Changing the World. It begins today and runs through March 11, and if you're a student or a senior, you can get a pass to all of the films for $15. A full-price pass costs $25 and lets you into all 13 astonishing, award-winning movies from around the world.
Here's the info on Saturday's screening and talk:
Film Discussion:
THE GREATEST SILENCE
with speaker Megan Watson, PhD, LMHP
Saturday, Feb. 27 - Film begins at 1:00
Discussion following film (approx. 2:20 p.m.)
Admission to the discussion is free and open to the public. Admission
to THE GREATEST SILENCE is at regular Ross prices.
Megan Watson is a psychologist in private practice who works with
treating immigrants, refugees, and torture survivors. Watson does
trauma work and focuses on culturally competent, holistic treatment.
Before its closure, Watson spent three years working at the FIRST
Project, a torture treatment center in Lincoln.
THE GREATEST SILENCE: RAPE IN THE CONGO
Winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize in Documentary and the
inspiration for a 2008 U.N. Resolution classifying rape as a weapon of
war, this extraordinary film, shot in the war zones of the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC), shatters the silence that surrounds the use
of sexual violence as a weapon of conflict.
Categories:
WILLA responds to Publishers Weekly's massive oversight (below) with a list of their own: "Great Books by Women That Publishers Weekly Missed in 2009." It's a Wiki, so go chime in!
For
Immediate Release
November 2, 2009
Why Weren’t Any Women Invited
To
Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?
Publishers Weekly recently announced their Best Books Of 2009 list. Of their top ten, chosen by
editorial staff, no books written by women were included. Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW
confidently admitted that
they're “not the most politically correct" choices. This statement comes in a year in
which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and
Alicia Ostriker.
“The
absence made me nearly speechless,” said writer Cate Marvin, cofounder of the newly launched
national literary organization WILLA (Women In Letters And Literary Arts), which, since
August, has attracted close
to 5400 members on their Facebook web page, including many major and emerging women writers. “It continues
to surprise me that literary
editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and
obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.”
WILLA’s other cofounder, Erin Belieu,
Director Of The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University, asked, “So is the flipside here that including
women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When
PW’s editors tell us they’re
not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist,
but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—-writers and readers--who
don’t feel good about it at all.”
PW also did a Top 100 list and, of the authors included, only 29 were women. The WILLA Advisory Board is in the process of putting together a list titled “Great Books Published By Women In 2009.” This will be posted to the organization’s Facebook page and website. A WILLA Wiki has also been started for people to share their nominations for Great Books By Women in 2009. Press release to follow.
WILLA was founded to bring increased
attention to women’s literary accomplishments and to question the American literary
establishment’s historical
slow-footedness in recognizing and rewarding women writer’s achievements. WILLA is about to launch their
website and is in the process
of planning their first national conference to be held next year.
(Note: until recently, WILLA went under
the acronym WILA, with one
“L.” If you’re interested in the organization, please Google WILA with one “L” to see background on
how this group was originally formed.)
For more information contact:
Erin Belieu ebelieu@fsu.edu
Cate Marvin catemarvin@gmail.com
Well, it's another bad day for the University of Nebraska and financial scandal. The Lincoln Journal-Star is on the job again, this time with a headline that reads
$40,000,000!
or the amount of money that's charged each year on credit cards held by University of Nebraska employees, much of which has gone for non-approved items. (As a friend and I said to each other, "Where do we sign up for these credit cards?" I don't know of any faculty members who have them.)
So now, in addition to my Porsche Cayenne, I want my $628 fountain pen and my $15,000 airline ticket to China. (Yes, you read that figure right. I wonder what kind of legroom that buys?) I'd like my $3,500 worth of office furniture and decorations, and I'd like my golf outing, please. Not that I play golf, but you know. I could walk around and ogle the plaid.
What sucks the most about this, though, is that regular folks are going to look at that massive $$$ number and those flagrant violations of policy, and, in the midst of a depressed economy, they're going to think the whole enterprise of higher education is one nasty hog-trough, when in fact these perks aren't making it down to the people who actually teach their kids. Which is a shame. I've got classroom computer equipment that won't work out here, folks, and no markers for the dry erase boards.
However, all y'all out there who are fellow members of the money-isn't-everything club can enjoy this video my sweet son Grey spontaneously, coincidentally just sent, called "What Teachers Make," a nice little piece of talkback from Taylor Mali.
In other news, a big warm congratulations to the outstanding young poet and creative nonfiction writer Madeline Wiseman, who just passed her oral capstone. ABD, baby! All but done.
And can I just gush for a second about what a fascinating experience it is to do an oral Ph.D. exam with not only a super student but also the iconic Hilda Raz, Barbara DiBernard, and Amelia Montes? Like, it almost makes giving up a Friday afternoon kind of fun. Like, when I flash back to 3 years ago at all-male Wabash, I can see that an afternoon like this one was almost unimaginable to me then. Five women in a room, conversing on the doctoral level about poetics, pedagogy, and trauma? We've come a long way, baby. Yes, sir.
We all have. Bottoms up.
or the amount of money that's charged each year on credit cards held by University of Nebraska employees, much of which has gone for non-approved items. (As a friend and I said to each other, "Where do we sign up for these credit cards?" I don't know of any faculty members who have them.)
So now, in addition to my Porsche Cayenne, I want my $628 fountain pen and my $15,000 airline ticket to China. (Yes, you read that figure right. I wonder what kind of legroom that buys?) I'd like my $3,500 worth of office furniture and decorations, and I'd like my golf outing, please. Not that I play golf, but you know. I could walk around and ogle the plaid.
What sucks the most about this, though, is that regular folks are going to look at that massive $$$ number and those flagrant violations of policy, and, in the midst of a depressed economy, they're going to think the whole enterprise of higher education is one nasty hog-trough, when in fact these perks aren't making it down to the people who actually teach their kids. Which is a shame. I've got classroom computer equipment that won't work out here, folks, and no markers for the dry erase boards.
However, all y'all out there who are fellow members of the money-isn't-everything club can enjoy this video my sweet son Grey spontaneously, coincidentally just sent, called "What Teachers Make," a nice little piece of talkback from Taylor Mali.
In other news, a big warm congratulations to the outstanding young poet and creative nonfiction writer Madeline Wiseman, who just passed her oral capstone. ABD, baby! All but done.
And can I just gush for a second about what a fascinating experience it is to do an oral Ph.D. exam with not only a super student but also the iconic Hilda Raz, Barbara DiBernard, and Amelia Montes? Like, it almost makes giving up a Friday afternoon kind of fun. Like, when I flash back to 3 years ago at all-male Wabash, I can see that an afternoon like this one was almost unimaginable to me then. Five women in a room, conversing on the doctoral level about poetics, pedagogy, and trauma? We've come a long way, baby. Yes, sir.
We all have. Bottoms up.
Hats off to Timothy Schaffert, who ran another great (downtown) omaha lit fest this weekend! I loved the setting--the cooler-than-cool KANEKO in the Old Market. Cody Lumpkin, a UNL grad student and compelling poet, did a beautiful job moderating the panel I was on with writers Amelia Montes, Belinda Acosta (about whom you've heard so much of late), Jeff Koterba, and publicist Lauren Cerand. We talked about options for meaningful and effective self-promotion in the age of Twitter to a huge, lovely, and gracious audience. (Jamie, please come by and see me! Yes, you! Yoga lady, drop me a line!)
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.
The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Hats off to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who've donated hundreds of copies of their terrific new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (reviewed in today's NYTBR, featured in a recent NYTimes Magazine), so that they could get their important message of investment and uplift out into the community. Many thanks to Jacqueline Scoones, associate director of KANEKO, where Kristof and WuDunn will be speaking this fall, who sent me home with a box of 12 brand-new hardcover copies to distribute to colleagues here at UNL.
Hats off to Amelia Montes for her great reading today at the Bennett Martin Public Library here in downtown Lincoln! She read from the introduction, letters, notes, and text of her brand-new Penguin Classics edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1872 novel Who Would Have Thought It?. If you're in the mood for a witty Civil War satire by one of the first Latina writers published in North America (the style reminds me a lot of Dickens), you should check it out. Amelia followed the Ruiz de Burton reading with an essay of her own, "Queen for a Day," that had us all moved and laughing. Luckily, it will be published this December in An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots.
Regarding Peter Schjeldahl's piece in the recent New Yorker, however, I feel much as the narrator does at the opening of Moby Dick: "that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off." Here's why.The concept of the destructive and reductive potential of the male gaze has been around in the culture for, oh, 30 years or so now, since John Berger and Laura Mulvey, so it's an unpleasant surprise to read not really much at all about the new Vermeer show at the Met in Schjeldahl's "Dutch Touch" but rather about the fact that one of Vermeer's milkmaid subjects is not quite to Schjeldahl's personal taste. She is "husky," he tells us--and then, two columns later, back on the topic, he makes sure to specify that she is "sturdy." Just in case we're unsure, he tells us that her "mass," "monumentally composed," "would stand [him] off, in an attitude of reverence, even if she were naked."
Um, thank you? (Oh, wait: Schjeldahl reads Proust, too, he wants you to know, and himself has a Proustian sensibility.)
This is what passes for art criticism in The New Yorker? Psssht. For shame.
Turns out kidnapper and child rapist Phillip Garrido was a Jehovah's Witness. As was, apparently, his aiding and abetting wife.
"Psychologists have speculated," says one article, "that Mrs Garrido was a victim of catastrophically low self-esteem and, once under her husband’s spell, would do anything to hold on to her man." On the other hand, a wife's subjection to the head of the household was also part of what we regularly heard from the Kingdom Hall lectern when I was growing up. Not that those two elements--catastrophically low self-esteem; religious/cultural dictum--are mutually exclusive. Not by a long shot.
I'm just sayin'.
Yesterday, I really did have jury duty--or at least, I was called to the local Hall of Justice for jury selection. We were in the courtroom of Judge Jean Lovell to be vetted to serve on a drunk driving case, and I know everyone always talks about jury duty with resigned dread, but it was actually pretty fascinating, and different from what I expected. Everyone--the clerk, the judge, the attorneys, even the metal-detector lady--was super-polite and explained everything, while I'd thought they'd be all brusque and impatient with us mere civilians, like on courtroom shows. Also, I'd only seen the insides of courthouses in West Virginia and Louisiana before, so I was startled by how clean, new, and plush everything was. The courtroom didn't even have a smell. And our jurors' chairs were padded and could rock backward.
Once the action started, the whole process was intriguing. (And even though the attorneys told us that it would be nothing like CSI or Law & Order, guess what? It kinda was.) The defendant--she of the alleged drunk driving episode--was actually sitting there eyeing us the whole time, which felt peculiar. She later gave her attorney whispered input about which of us to jettison.
The process of the voir dire, the vetting of jurors for bias by the attorneys (which the Nebraskan attorneys pronounced sort of like boudoir, which was confusing), took hours. Have you ever taken a breathalyzer test? Have you ever worked in a place that served alcohol? Do you have formal training in the chemical and biological aspects of alcohol metabolism? We knew a whole lot more about each other than most strangers do. (And I've got to say, this is a mighty drinkin' town.) By the time the lawyers were making their secret checkmarks on the list of our names, deciding who to get rid of, I was so interested and invested that I wanted to stay.
Alas, they gave me my walking papers. I don't know which thing I said made one of the lawyers cross me off, and I never get to learn which lawyer it was. Sigh.
I hope I get called again. Seriously, I do.
"Psychologists have speculated," says one article, "that Mrs Garrido was a victim of catastrophically low self-esteem and, once under her husband’s spell, would do anything to hold on to her man." On the other hand, a wife's subjection to the head of the household was also part of what we regularly heard from the Kingdom Hall lectern when I was growing up. Not that those two elements--catastrophically low self-esteem; religious/cultural dictum--are mutually exclusive. Not by a long shot.
I'm just sayin'.
Yesterday, I really did have jury duty--or at least, I was called to the local Hall of Justice for jury selection. We were in the courtroom of Judge Jean Lovell to be vetted to serve on a drunk driving case, and I know everyone always talks about jury duty with resigned dread, but it was actually pretty fascinating, and different from what I expected. Everyone--the clerk, the judge, the attorneys, even the metal-detector lady--was super-polite and explained everything, while I'd thought they'd be all brusque and impatient with us mere civilians, like on courtroom shows. Also, I'd only seen the insides of courthouses in West Virginia and Louisiana before, so I was startled by how clean, new, and plush everything was. The courtroom didn't even have a smell. And our jurors' chairs were padded and could rock backward.
Once the action started, the whole process was intriguing. (And even though the attorneys told us that it would be nothing like CSI or Law & Order, guess what? It kinda was.) The defendant--she of the alleged drunk driving episode--was actually sitting there eyeing us the whole time, which felt peculiar. She later gave her attorney whispered input about which of us to jettison.
The process of the voir dire, the vetting of jurors for bias by the attorneys (which the Nebraskan attorneys pronounced sort of like boudoir, which was confusing), took hours. Have you ever taken a breathalyzer test? Have you ever worked in a place that served alcohol? Do you have formal training in the chemical and biological aspects of alcohol metabolism? We knew a whole lot more about each other than most strangers do. (And I've got to say, this is a mighty drinkin' town.) By the time the lawyers were making their secret checkmarks on the list of our names, deciding who to get rid of, I was so interested and invested that I wanted to stay.
Alas, they gave me my walking papers. I don't know which thing I said made one of the lawyers cross me off, and I never get to learn which lawyer it was. Sigh.
I hope I get called again. Seriously, I do.
Categories:
Gentle Readers, good news! More magazine has just published this moving piece by the wonderful journalist Beatriz Terrazas. It's about making peace with wrenching childhood trauma and with the imperfect, inadequate actions of the adults most responsible for protecting us.It was my privilege to meet Beatriz when she took a memoir-writing workshop with Lorraine López and me at Macondo in 2008. Our week together was so intense and sparked so much good work. I loved getting to know Beatriz there in San Antonio and have since taught one of her other essays in the Chicana/Chicano lit classroom.
I love the bravery and strength of this new memoir piece and am so glad that More is sharing it with a broad readership. Congratulations, Beatriz!
Chica lit, done right, is no easy genre. It needs to mix froth with genuine tugs to the heartstrings, and the best practitioners also weave in smart social commentary about class, culture, and gender, as does mi reina Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who broke out in 2003 with The Dirty Girls Social Club, a kind of Waiting to Exhale for Latina readers. The Dirty Girls Social Club blazed a viable trail for commercial Latina writers by demonstrating to the publishing industry that, hey, Latinas read for fun. Alas, sometimes the host of imitators spawned by Valdes-Rodriguez just rehash standard chick-lit formulas with the occasional ¡Híjole! tossed in. (I’m not naming names here; they know who they are.)
I’m proud and excited that my friend and fellow Macondista Belinda Acosta has thrown her hat solidly in the ring with her forthcoming novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, due out from Grand Central Publishing this August. (Her editor there, Selina McLemore, is also the wonderful Lorraine López’s editor--and was Josefina Lopez’s editor for Hungry Woman in Paris; it’s a small Latina world.)
Belinda has her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is the TV and media columnist for the Austin Chronicle. Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, which will launch on August 11 and is available for pre-order now, is her first novel, and it’s also the first in a series, the Quinceañera Club. If my sources are correct, Belinda has also written (already!) the second installation. Very exciting!
Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz traverses new cultural territory, since its heroine Ana Ruiz, rather than being single, is the 38-year-old married (well, separated) mama of two teenagers, one of whom is an openly hostile 14-year-old girl who blames Ana for her husband’s recent departure from their home. To reconnect with her daughter, Ana wants to plan her quinceañera together, but plans go awry and mayhem ensues. Meanwhile, Ana has to figure out her own romantic destiny.
Some elements of the story will be familiar to readers of chick and chica lit: Ana has a best gal-pal who gives advice and comfort from the sidelines, a successful (but not entirely fulfilling) career, and an apparent choice between differently desirable men, in this case Ana’s estranged husband and the handsome visiting artist from Mexico who reawakens Ana’s thrill factor. Except for a quick scene with lesbian walk-ons, the novel is strongly heteronormative; all the main characters are straight.
But the plotline also diverges from standard chick-lit and chica-lit fare. While negotiating her own dreams and desires, Ana must also face the complexity of mothering complicated adolescents (as well as her unmothered niece—ah, familia!), and she’s forced to consider the ramifications of her own sexuality upon her family’s future. In contrast to Sex and the City and its variously inflected ilk, in which 38-year-old women are “girls” who buy snazzy shoes and fly solo, Belinda’s new novel keeps a female protagonist at the center, but work, familia, and responsibilities play a much bigger role, and designer bags and giddy cocktails are noticeably absent. Unlike the relative free-fall individualism practiced by most chick-lit and chica-lit protagonists, Ana juggles the financial and emotional responsibility for more lives than just her own.
When the novel opens, Ana has been carrying the full responsibilities of adulthood for 20 years already. As a mother and primary breadwinner, she’s not just in a pickle; she’s tired. In this key divergence from the typical chica-lit plot and protagonist, Belinda makes a valuable intervention in chica lit. It’s a welcome shot of realism in a genre that trades in escape.
That said, it’s also a fun read with engaging passages and lively pop-culture references (especially music). The pace is rapid, and characters are often sketched in a few quick lines. There’s plenty of dialogue, but on the whole, the narrative mode tends to privilege telling over showing, but the telling functions here as an economical way to deliver a lot of information about the characters and their dilemmas. Readers of Latina will enjoy Belinda’s breezy, pro-empowerment handling of social issues, as in this passage about colorism within the Latino community:
As a former happy resident of San Antonio, I love the fact that Belinda set her novel there, and I enjoyed coming across references to paleta carts, the Blanco Street Café, Brackenridge Park, the Esperanza Center, and the occasional pecan tree.
In terms of characters, the protagonist Ana’s choices and thoughts seems frequently constrained by guilt, which made me guess that the book will resonate more for readers whose values are more traditional than mine—and if its happy ending (por supuesto it has a happy ending!) offers readers a brighter, lighter vision of what a woman’s life can be, then it will be doing important cultural work. And a writer-friend who once taught high school says the 14-year-old daughter’s grumpy yet vulnerable behavior and dialogue are spot-on.
My own favorite character was teenaged Bianca, Ana’s niece, who comes vividly to life in one of the novel’s subplots. She’s faced with the difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship with an institutionalized mother whose breakdown occurred in conjunction with Bianca’s own quinceañera, during which she destroyed Bianca’s dress. Because I had painful conflicts with my own mother when I was fourteen, this was a particularly rich moment for me, and I hope the second novel in the series delves further into the psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced, in an image-driven society that exhorts women to look young forever, to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.
I really love the fascinating narrator Belinda concocted. She’s omniscient—the voice of the community (sort of like Faulkner’s narrator in “A Rose for Emily”)—yet particularized. It’s the believable voice of an older, wiser, all-seeing Latina looking down on the whole mess, critiquing the characters and yet rooting for their happiness, like a salty old aunt who’s gonna tell it like it is, sabe? Belinda has fun with language in the narrator’s voice, too: Ana, the narrator tells us, is “no spring kitten,” and “not escared of much.”
This voice is especially pronounced in the opening prologue, the beginning of chapter seventeen, and the final pages of the novel, giving it a strong frame. In the rest of the novel, it works much like a typical omniscient narrator, working flexibly to give Belinda the freedom to shift from one focalizer to another, building understanding and sympathy for a whole cast of characters, and occasionally providing commentary (and comic relief). In this, the novel works as an ensemble piece, a community and family novel that examines how a variety of sociocultural factors affect everyone’s choices and desires.
As an academic scholar and teacher of Latina/o lit, I particularly admired the book’s seamless, completely natural-sounding integration of Spanish and Spanglish into a predominantly English-language text. (Belinda has staked out solid political ground for herself here. For a fascinating academic treatment of the political ramifications of language-use choices, see “In the Contact Zone: Code-switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers” by Lourdes Torres in MELUS 32 [2007].)
In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, Spanish words are not italicized, and thus not marked as foreign or other. They’re also almost never cushioned (which is when the word’s or phrase’s definition in English is provided immediately afterward). Puns dependent on Spanish knowledge aren’t parsed for the reader. The reader either knows the word, or gathers its meaning from context, or doesn’t; there’s no textual pandering to monolingual English readers. Yet the book is written primarily in English and would feel, I’m guessing, pretty comfortable to a non-Latina/o reader—or to folks whose Spanish, like mine, is todo rickety.
I have a lot of questions for Belinda, and she has been kind enough to agree to answer them soon. Watch for the upcoming Q&A!
I’m proud and excited that my friend and fellow Macondista Belinda Acosta has thrown her hat solidly in the ring with her forthcoming novel Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, due out from Grand Central Publishing this August. (Her editor there, Selina McLemore, is also the wonderful Lorraine López’s editor--and was Josefina Lopez’s editor for Hungry Woman in Paris; it’s a small Latina world.) Belinda has her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is the TV and media columnist for the Austin Chronicle. Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, which will launch on August 11 and is available for pre-order now, is her first novel, and it’s also the first in a series, the Quinceañera Club. If my sources are correct, Belinda has also written (already!) the second installation. Very exciting!
Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz traverses new cultural territory, since its heroine Ana Ruiz, rather than being single, is the 38-year-old married (well, separated) mama of two teenagers, one of whom is an openly hostile 14-year-old girl who blames Ana for her husband’s recent departure from their home. To reconnect with her daughter, Ana wants to plan her quinceañera together, but plans go awry and mayhem ensues. Meanwhile, Ana has to figure out her own romantic destiny.
Some elements of the story will be familiar to readers of chick and chica lit: Ana has a best gal-pal who gives advice and comfort from the sidelines, a successful (but not entirely fulfilling) career, and an apparent choice between differently desirable men, in this case Ana’s estranged husband and the handsome visiting artist from Mexico who reawakens Ana’s thrill factor. Except for a quick scene with lesbian walk-ons, the novel is strongly heteronormative; all the main characters are straight.
But the plotline also diverges from standard chick-lit and chica-lit fare. While negotiating her own dreams and desires, Ana must also face the complexity of mothering complicated adolescents (as well as her unmothered niece—ah, familia!), and she’s forced to consider the ramifications of her own sexuality upon her family’s future. In contrast to Sex and the City and its variously inflected ilk, in which 38-year-old women are “girls” who buy snazzy shoes and fly solo, Belinda’s new novel keeps a female protagonist at the center, but work, familia, and responsibilities play a much bigger role, and designer bags and giddy cocktails are noticeably absent. Unlike the relative free-fall individualism practiced by most chick-lit and chica-lit protagonists, Ana juggles the financial and emotional responsibility for more lives than just her own.
When the novel opens, Ana has been carrying the full responsibilities of adulthood for 20 years already. As a mother and primary breadwinner, she’s not just in a pickle; she’s tired. In this key divergence from the typical chica-lit plot and protagonist, Belinda makes a valuable intervention in chica lit. It’s a welcome shot of realism in a genre that trades in escape.
That said, it’s also a fun read with engaging passages and lively pop-culture references (especially music). The pace is rapid, and characters are often sketched in a few quick lines. There’s plenty of dialogue, but on the whole, the narrative mode tends to privilege telling over showing, but the telling functions here as an economical way to deliver a lot of information about the characters and their dilemmas. Readers of Latina will enjoy Belinda’s breezy, pro-empowerment handling of social issues, as in this passage about colorism within the Latino community:
Bianca . . . was lean and curvy like most of the girls in the family, but unlike the rest of them, she was blond with sea-green eyes, something that used to bother her when she was a little girl. As a teenager, she came to accept her “güera” label. So, when some tonto said, “Hey, how come you don’t look Mexican?” Bianca replied, “We come in all flavors, menso!” turning on her heel to leave the baboso, her ponytail snapping like a whip.Throughout the novel, Belinda weaves in socioeconomic and cultural factors with a light but telling hand. Ana’s estranged husband Esteban’s crisis of masculinity, for example, is exacerbated by the fact that he was long ago unable to pass the firefighters’ exam—due in part, the novel suggests, to his difficulties learning English—and has been stuck in manual labor while Ana moved on up the educational and socioeconomic ladder without him. The private tensions of their marriage stem from wider tensions in the culture, and many women of color will recognize elements of that story from their own lives. I like the fact that Belinda’s sociopolitical and cultural awareness plays a role in the story’s shape, even though the project is ostensibly just for fun.
As a former happy resident of San Antonio, I love the fact that Belinda set her novel there, and I enjoyed coming across references to paleta carts, the Blanco Street Café, Brackenridge Park, the Esperanza Center, and the occasional pecan tree.
In terms of characters, the protagonist Ana’s choices and thoughts seems frequently constrained by guilt, which made me guess that the book will resonate more for readers whose values are more traditional than mine—and if its happy ending (por supuesto it has a happy ending!) offers readers a brighter, lighter vision of what a woman’s life can be, then it will be doing important cultural work. And a writer-friend who once taught high school says the 14-year-old daughter’s grumpy yet vulnerable behavior and dialogue are spot-on.
My own favorite character was teenaged Bianca, Ana’s niece, who comes vividly to life in one of the novel’s subplots. She’s faced with the difficult situation of rebuilding a relationship with an institutionalized mother whose breakdown occurred in conjunction with Bianca’s own quinceañera, during which she destroyed Bianca’s dress. Because I had painful conflicts with my own mother when I was fourteen, this was a particularly rich moment for me, and I hope the second novel in the series delves further into the psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced, in an image-driven society that exhorts women to look young forever, to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.
I really love the fascinating narrator Belinda concocted. She’s omniscient—the voice of the community (sort of like Faulkner’s narrator in “A Rose for Emily”)—yet particularized. It’s the believable voice of an older, wiser, all-seeing Latina looking down on the whole mess, critiquing the characters and yet rooting for their happiness, like a salty old aunt who’s gonna tell it like it is, sabe? Belinda has fun with language in the narrator’s voice, too: Ana, the narrator tells us, is “no spring kitten,” and “not escared of much.”
This voice is especially pronounced in the opening prologue, the beginning of chapter seventeen, and the final pages of the novel, giving it a strong frame. In the rest of the novel, it works much like a typical omniscient narrator, working flexibly to give Belinda the freedom to shift from one focalizer to another, building understanding and sympathy for a whole cast of characters, and occasionally providing commentary (and comic relief). In this, the novel works as an ensemble piece, a community and family novel that examines how a variety of sociocultural factors affect everyone’s choices and desires.
As an academic scholar and teacher of Latina/o lit, I particularly admired the book’s seamless, completely natural-sounding integration of Spanish and Spanglish into a predominantly English-language text. (Belinda has staked out solid political ground for herself here. For a fascinating academic treatment of the political ramifications of language-use choices, see “In the Contact Zone: Code-switching Strategies by Latino/a Writers” by Lourdes Torres in MELUS 32 [2007].)
In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz, Spanish words are not italicized, and thus not marked as foreign or other. They’re also almost never cushioned (which is when the word’s or phrase’s definition in English is provided immediately afterward). Puns dependent on Spanish knowledge aren’t parsed for the reader. The reader either knows the word, or gathers its meaning from context, or doesn’t; there’s no textual pandering to monolingual English readers. Yet the book is written primarily in English and would feel, I’m guessing, pretty comfortable to a non-Latina/o reader—or to folks whose Spanish, like mine, is todo rickety.
I have a lot of questions for Belinda, and she has been kind enough to agree to answer them soon. Watch for the upcoming Q&A!
The yammering about whether Sonia Sotomayor will judge "differently" because of her ethnicity and gender grinds on. (The line that's riling folks, which you've probably read or heard a dozen times now, comes from a speech she gave 8 years ago: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Critics object that the rule of law, not personal experience, is what should guide a judge's decision in any given case.)
This interesting addition to the discussion, "Debate on Whether Female Justices Decide Differently Arises Anew," appeared in yesterday's New York Times.
The piece focuses on a Supreme Court case regarding a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by school authorities for OTC painkillers. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the search objectionable; her colleagues (all 8 of whom are male, remember) weren't troubled.
Leaving aside the specific issue of strip-searching a kid for ibuprofen, I want to look at the assumptions embedded in the way this story is being described in language, as in this line: "But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so" (emphasis definitely mine).
So what I want to do is back up for a moment and unpack this. The word differently implies--necessitates--the existence of a norm to differ from. Such a norm indeed exists, and it is the norm of "law." But this "law," which has been written and revised over hundreds of years, is a construction made by individuals and groups of people, working together, imperfectly, over time. This construction has been authored (almost entirely exclusively, until the late 20th century) by only one identity group: white males (and you might nuance that to say mostly "economically privileged white males," though some worked their way up, etc.).
Thus, this form of writing, this body of codes, necessarily bears the marks of that group's experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world. It cannot avoid doing so.
But today, these particularities are neutralized in the common imagination and in the media because, hey, it's "law." It's been authenticated by the highest political authorities available. (But again, these authenticating authorities have been white males.)
Only if you believe that the norm--the law--is magically right, which suggests a lack of historical awareness (Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone?), or if, hmm, you benefit from the way the norm is constructed, will the idea of things being done "differently" keep you up at night.
If history had been different--if women, say, had authored the statutes that governed what is legal and illegal--then reporters might be commenting on how gender-biased were these responses of two male judges, whose perspectives stem directly from the personal experience of being socialized as boys:
But again, no reporters are pointing that out.
Women know (and may have lived) the statistics: approximately 1 in 8 of us are raped as adults (by men; let's name it), and approximately 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of us are sexually molested in childhood (primarily by men--by a vast margin). Most of us have been monitoring our dress, physical behaviors, and spatial freedom since childhood in order to mitigate the possibilities of such assaults. We carry our keys (and maybe pepper spray) in our hands and check the backseat of our locked cars when we walk out of the grocery store at night. Again, in the interests of naming the unspoken, this is due to the prevalence of attacks by men.
This is our daily, lived experience. These are the micropractices that shape our consciousnesses.
We also know intimately the various confusions of menarche, adolescence, and the attentions--welcome and otherwise--that our maturing bodies bring. We are thus far more likely to question the needfulness of an adolescent girl's being "made to stretch out her bra and underpants" so that school officials can inspect what's within. (For ibuprofen, remember. We're not talking heroin or explosives here.) Our experience inflects our understanding of what such a strip-search would feel like. We can empathize with the girl in a way that male judges' personal experience apparently prevents them from doing.
Sexual inequality before the law isn't ancient history. In graduate school in Texas in the mid-1990s, when I was sexually harassed by a man masturbating on the street, I was able to obtain his vehicle's license plate number, which I gave to the police. Because I had filed a report, my name and address were available to anyone (including the harasser) for a nominal paperwork fee. His name and address, however--though the police knew them, based on his license--were not made available to me. That was the law. The police drove by his place of business to give him a warning; they didn't want to go to his house, because he was married, they said, and they didn't want to stir up trouble with his wife. A warning, to my knowledge, is all he ever got.
He knew I had complained, and he could learn, if he desired, exactly where to find me. There was nothing I could do to prevent that, no way of protecting my name and address.
Who wrote those laws? Who enforced them? Who benefits?
So yes, women view the law (when it speaks to gendered concerns) "differently"--differently from men, for whose advantage the laws have long been written. Likewise, men also view the law differently--differently from women. Alas, women haven't historically held sufficient power to make their views of the world into "law," so the norm from which male views differ is a muted or even silenced view.
I think we can safely extrapolate from this to issues of race & ethnicity and economic class, to which Sotomayor can speak from experience, as well as sexual orientation and religion. Only when all people's standpoints are represented in the halls of power will justice be real. Only then can we afford to let it be blind. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes open, and so should the media.
Will Sonia Sotomayor judge differently? Probably, when it's relevant. And it's a difference we need.
This interesting addition to the discussion, "Debate on Whether Female Justices Decide Differently Arises Anew," appeared in yesterday's New York Times.
The piece focuses on a Supreme Court case regarding a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched by school authorities for OTC painkillers. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found the search objectionable; her colleagues (all 8 of whom are male, remember) weren't troubled.
Leaving aside the specific issue of strip-searching a kid for ibuprofen, I want to look at the assumptions embedded in the way this story is being described in language, as in this line: "But the idea that women may inherently view the law differently on occasion is something that troubles even several female judges who believe it may be so" (emphasis definitely mine).
So what I want to do is back up for a moment and unpack this. The word differently implies--necessitates--the existence of a norm to differ from. Such a norm indeed exists, and it is the norm of "law." But this "law," which has been written and revised over hundreds of years, is a construction made by individuals and groups of people, working together, imperfectly, over time. This construction has been authored (almost entirely exclusively, until the late 20th century) by only one identity group: white males (and you might nuance that to say mostly "economically privileged white males," though some worked their way up, etc.).
Thus, this form of writing, this body of codes, necessarily bears the marks of that group's experiences, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world. It cannot avoid doing so.
But today, these particularities are neutralized in the common imagination and in the media because, hey, it's "law." It's been authenticated by the highest political authorities available. (But again, these authenticating authorities have been white males.)
Only if you believe that the norm--the law--is magically right, which suggests a lack of historical awareness (Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone?), or if, hmm, you benefit from the way the norm is constructed, will the idea of things being done "differently" keep you up at night.
If history had been different--if women, say, had authored the statutes that governed what is legal and illegal--then reporters might be commenting on how gender-biased were these responses of two male judges, whose perspectives stem directly from the personal experience of being socialized as boys:
Justice Steven G. Breyer was one of several on the court who suggested during oral argument that he was untroubled by the search. Justice Breyer said that when he was that age, boys stripped down to their underwear in the locker room and “people did stick things in my underwear,” a comment that produced hearty laughter from Justice Thomas.But the influence of personal experience of masculine socialization--and how it might make a male judge deem some things unimportant--goes unremarked by reporters. Even the metaphors chosen by male judges, as in the "comments by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas . . . that judges should be like neutral baseball umpires," are inflected by gendered experience. (Don't Title IX me. Thomas [b. 1948] and Roberts [b. 1955] were out of school before that little gem, which passed in '72, took effect.)
But again, no reporters are pointing that out.
Women know (and may have lived) the statistics: approximately 1 in 8 of us are raped as adults (by men; let's name it), and approximately 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 of us are sexually molested in childhood (primarily by men--by a vast margin). Most of us have been monitoring our dress, physical behaviors, and spatial freedom since childhood in order to mitigate the possibilities of such assaults. We carry our keys (and maybe pepper spray) in our hands and check the backseat of our locked cars when we walk out of the grocery store at night. Again, in the interests of naming the unspoken, this is due to the prevalence of attacks by men.
This is our daily, lived experience. These are the micropractices that shape our consciousnesses.
We also know intimately the various confusions of menarche, adolescence, and the attentions--welcome and otherwise--that our maturing bodies bring. We are thus far more likely to question the needfulness of an adolescent girl's being "made to stretch out her bra and underpants" so that school officials can inspect what's within. (For ibuprofen, remember. We're not talking heroin or explosives here.) Our experience inflects our understanding of what such a strip-search would feel like. We can empathize with the girl in a way that male judges' personal experience apparently prevents them from doing.
Sexual inequality before the law isn't ancient history. In graduate school in Texas in the mid-1990s, when I was sexually harassed by a man masturbating on the street, I was able to obtain his vehicle's license plate number, which I gave to the police. Because I had filed a report, my name and address were available to anyone (including the harasser) for a nominal paperwork fee. His name and address, however--though the police knew them, based on his license--were not made available to me. That was the law. The police drove by his place of business to give him a warning; they didn't want to go to his house, because he was married, they said, and they didn't want to stir up trouble with his wife. A warning, to my knowledge, is all he ever got.
He knew I had complained, and he could learn, if he desired, exactly where to find me. There was nothing I could do to prevent that, no way of protecting my name and address.
Who wrote those laws? Who enforced them? Who benefits?
So yes, women view the law (when it speaks to gendered concerns) "differently"--differently from men, for whose advantage the laws have long been written. Likewise, men also view the law differently--differently from women. Alas, women haven't historically held sufficient power to make their views of the world into "law," so the norm from which male views differ is a muted or even silenced view.
I think we can safely extrapolate from this to issues of race & ethnicity and economic class, to which Sotomayor can speak from experience, as well as sexual orientation and religion. Only when all people's standpoints are represented in the halls of power will justice be real. Only then can we afford to let it be blind. In the meantime, I'm keeping my eyes open, and so should the media.
Will Sonia Sotomayor judge differently? Probably, when it's relevant. And it's a difference we need.
Categories:
