Why writing through the lens of gender identity, or any identity, is equally relevant to politicized opinions.
by Emma Winsor Wood
What struck me most in the wake of Jill Abramson’s abrupt departure from the New York Times was my Twitter feed. Everyone I followed seemed outraged, even if they acknowledged the story filtering down to us was only one version, lacking (we hoped) in crucial nuance and detail.
In the age of self-curation, everyone’s Internet is biased, and mine is no exception: I follow mostly liberal-minded journalists and writers, many with an overtly feminist bent. However, as an active Twitter user for the past five years, I had never seen my Twitter-verse so suddenly and thoroughly united in its reaction to a national event (except during national tragedies like the Boston Marathon bombing). Even the recent outburst of support for the young women kidnapped by Boko Haram, marked with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, was a slow-burning issue that took weeks to saturate the media. When the kidnapping finally got the attention it deserved, I could still make out a multiplicity of voices on the issue–most notably that of Teju Cole, who pointed out that Boko Haram had been terrorizing Nigerians, unremarked upon, for years.
Though Abramson was fired two weeks ago tomorrow, her Twitter hashtag remains active and media outlets are continuing to capitalize on the story, which coincided (ironically, somewhat fortuitously for scandal-hungry journalists) with the resignation of Le Monde’s managing editor Natalie Nougayrede. The simultaneous loss of two celebrated women journalists from positions of power has prompted an outpouring of gender-based commentary usually reserved for one of The Atlantic’s feature articles as well as a number of thoughtful Atlantic-ish feature pieces published elsewhere. It is likely “the woman question” has not enjoyed such prominence in the media since it was last called “the woman question.”
I was not surprised to find that all of this writing about women by women had sparked a mini-debate about precisely this kind of writing. In a review for the New Yorker’s book blog, Alice Gregory wrote,
“For young women just starting out in journalism today, it is perilously easy to fall into the trap of writing only about so-called women’s issues. In a media environment that reliably rewards trading on one’s gender identity, the financial incentive for young female writers to approach the world with a narrow set of politicized questions–the answers to which they already know–is great. And while there is surely a place for this, no girl grows up wanting to count bylines or to scour TV shows for signs of sexism. This week in particular, in the wake of Jill Abramson’s firing by the Times, is a good moment for women journalists to remember Nellie Bly, a flawed but still effective model who wrote about what she wanted instead of arming herself with the hammer she acquired in her youth and spending the rest of her career searching for nails.”
Gregory captures something true here: sites like Jezebel, Feministing, Salon’s Broadsheet, and Slate’s Double X all rely, to varying extents, on their ability to generate outrage in women readers. This outrage can sometimes feel forced and unproductive, as if a response had indeed been written with “a narrow set of politicized questions” in mind. But Gregory’s generalized rebuke does not distinguish between different types of writing about “so-called women’s issues,” and, couched within condescending language, her acknowledgment that “there is surely a place for this [kind of writing]” reads like an empty, obligatory gesture. She makes women writing about these “so-called women’s issues” feel, as New York Magazine columnist Ann Friedman wrote in response to Gregory, “less-than.”
Gregory’s words reflect a larger atmosphere of condescension toward identity-based writing, whether it be about gender, race, or sexuality. Her words remind me of my college boyfriend, who made me feel like a second-rate scholar for what he saw as my narrow and predictable focus on the role of women in a certain book, poem, painting, or play. What offended him was not that I had identified a reliable point of entry into areas of history and literature that might otherwise not interest me; what offended him was that this point of entry happened to be women. Discomfited by his comments, I decided to write a 20-page paper on something completely different. No women allowed. I hated writing that paper. After the boyfriend and I broke up, I went on to write a senior thesis all about women that won two prizes. One of my readers observed that what animated the paper was my “obvious feminist passion.”
And yet, again and again, in interactions with straight white men, I have encountered the sentiment that focusing on identity issues can hamper success–that in choosing to care about “women’s issues,” I was, as Gregory put it, choosing “to approach the world with a narrow set of politicized questions–the answers to which [I] already know.” In fact, the opposite is true: writing about women forces me to push past my initial media-driven feminist outrage to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of an issue. As Friedman observes in her blog response,
“I remain interested in “so-called women’s issues” precisely because I don’t know all the answers to politicized questions. One of my main criteria in deciding what to write about is, “Do I feel confused and/or uncomfortable about this? And could I write through those feelings to some sort of better understanding?”
Perhaps not all writers approach their topics with the same open mind. But even so, what makes writers who focus on identity issues different (or less than) any other type of political commentator? How frequently do columnists like Gail Collins, Peggy Noonan, or Nicholas Kristof stray from their party’s core values? Writers at places like Jezebel and Slate are paid to have a politicized opinion about cultural events: their politics simply happen to be affiliated most closely with gender identity rather than a political party.
Activism is defined as “vigorous campaigning to bring about social change.” The Internet has made it easier than ever for groups to band together and police people and institutions that still think they can get away with prejudice. Maybe it’s true that “no girl grows up wanting to count bylines or to scour TV shows for signs of sexism.” But most girls–like most people–do grow up wanting to change the world.
Riveter co-founder Joanna Demkiewicz observed in an interview, “In a lovely, perfect, equal world, Riveter won’t even have to exist.” The same could be said about women writing about women’s issues: “In a lovely, perfect, equal word, [it] won’t even have to exist.” But the world is not lovely or perfect or equal–not yet. In the meantime, please, women and men, keep writing through the lens of your identity. Critical mass foments change.
Emma Winsor Wood is a poet and freelance writer. She writes the Women and Words column for TheRiveterMagazine.com. You can find her on Twitter @EmmaWinsorWood.
