| Tuesday, April 27, 2010 12:32PM | | | | World Voices: Women, Sex & Fiction | Posted By: Alta Ifland
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| Tags: gender difference, fiction, women | Monday 26: "Women, Sex and Fiction"
This panel focused on the relationship between the writers’ identity and the voices they impersonate in their works. The first question raised by the moderator, Claire Messud, was: “Does it matter who the writers are?”
Norman Rush answered by giving the example of the reaction caused by his novel, Mating, written from the perspective of a woman. Many women, he said, found this offensive at the time (that is, about twenty years ago). Lorraine Adams added that this was because at the time people were more militant (Rush used the word “dogmatic,” which I think is more appropriate) but failed to specify that those “people” were women.
Esther Allen (an important translator from the Spanish) was, during this panel, the perfect incarnation and exemplification of the idea that those who live between two or more cultures and languages— translators in particular—are able to place things in a broader context and are more anchored in history and cultural specificity. She answered Messud’s question via a quote from a Surrealist writer: “Nothing would/could kill a writer more than being made to represent a country.” She opined that the question shouldn’t be whether a writer has the right to adopt another voice, but how well he/she does it.
Alex Epstein, the one member “representing” the “foreign writer” on this panel (he writes in Hebrew), who was also the youngest, brought a refreshing note of humor to the discussion, saying that in his library the books are arranged by nationality simply because it's easier to find them, but it would be absurd to arrange them according to their authors’ gender or eye color.
(I agree--though in today's global world even the classification by nationality is problematic. I grew up in Romania, but I live in the States and I write in French and English, so where do I belong? Still, If we put this discussion in a historical context, we should remember that there was a time when writers did represent a nation. Some of the most important European writers contributed to the creation of their nation’s modern language: English in the case of Shakespeare, Italian in the case of Dante, Romanian in the case of Eminescu. To classify writers according to their gender is more absurd, insofar as writers don’t write with their genitalia. Even if we accept the premise that the female brain differs from the male brain—which is what many neuroscientists say—this classification is still absurd because it should be extended to all forms of knowledge, including scientific. In other words: if we accept this classification, we should also accept that a scientific discovery done by a woman or a homosexual is pre-determined by the scientist’s gender or sexuality).
Epstein quoted Tsvetaeva’s words “All poets are Jewish”—meaning, he explained, that they all belong to an oppressed minority, and, I would add, that they are nomads moving between cultures. Claire Messud quoted Elizabeth Bishop who didn’t like to be included in anthologies of “women writers” because she considered herself a writer, not a “woman writer.” Here again, no one mentioned that this “ghetto” mentality usually comes from the minorities themselves—in this case, women, though it’s the same for “gay writers” and various ethnic or racial groups—and that this is a specifically American way of looking at things.
As a former European (more specifically East-European) I am very much aware of certain American specificities that in an American context and from an American perspective are discussed within the frame of “gender difference”—when the same question would be for a European simply an “Americanism.” To give an example: several years ago I read an anthology of “women’s writing” from Eastern Europe, in which the editors (American and Canadian) deplored the fact that in Eastern Europe concepts like “women’s writing/literature” are despised, and took it as a lack of female emancipation. It didn’t cross their minds that such concepts may have to do less with women’s emancipation as with a compartmentalized way of perceiving and structuring reality, which is specifically American.
The other important question was voiced by Norman Rush: “Why 80% of people who read fiction are (at least in this country) women?” His answer: men aren’t reading fiction because they don’t feel the need for it. This answer is, actually, less banal than it may seem because it implies that there are deep psychological or structural causes that make men and women respond differently to a need that all human beings have, which is the need for fantasy or evasion from reality. Women respond to this need by reading fiction (and as a former bookseller I can testify to that); men by watching porn, which is now more available than ever. Also as a former bookseller, I should add that most of the fiction read by women consists of romance novels—a more “feminine” form of porn in the sense that it satisfies the same need as the latter. | | |
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| 7-12-10 7:23PM: Margaret Diehl said...
In my experience women read more fiction of all kinds than men do. It would be interesting to know if men watch more TV, or go to more movies. Yes, romance is women's porn, in a way; women respond more erotically to words than pictures. I'd like to know if the male predilection for visual images applies to stories in general.
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