We've been working, in prose fiction class, towards a general suggestion that fictional prose itself -- or Renaissance fictional prose prose, anyway, inflected by the importation of love-obsessed Italian forms -- is possibly gendred female. That is, if styles may be said to have genders, of course, but let's say that they do.
Or maybe let's not even take that for granted. Why is it that we -- or at least I -- look to put a particularly binary-gendered spin on something that isn't even remotely anthropomorphic? Partially, I'm sure, it's the culture in which I have grown up. Identifying gender-troubled or trouble-causing gender aspects of anything is a good way to get praise for insight in our society. Not just me, but our whole social and critical world place a whole lot of emphasis on strict gender division -- and thus on its transgression.
But I also wonder if this has something also to do with public discourse, with enfranshisement through printed speech. We are tending to treat these fictional works as if they were revolutionary -- as, in many ways they were. They initiate a new category of public and publishable speech, of popular speech -- and I wonder if that automatically allies them with femaleness or female speaking.
That is not, of course, to say that the actual writers of these works were female (they weren't) or that they adopted female voices (they didn't -- until Moll Flanders) . It is, however, to suggest that new forms of public speech are perhaps extra-identified with femaleness, perhaps through being particularly attractive to women or particularly constructed around a female voice (sometimes a powerfully present voice, sometimes a powerfully absent voice).
If we think of public/published speaking as necessarily a dialogue, then it makes sense that a new form of speaking would be associated with subjugated or previously unheard speech, or with dangerous speech -- one way to figure forth that association is to think about women's voices and women's readership. I'm not quite pulling this out of my ass, entirely, either -- I definitely think there's an extra focus in the preferatory material we're reading on "lady readers" and an extra-transgressive place for female readers/speakers within the texts.
I'm also thinking of other new public speech forms, and whether they get female-identified too, and I suspect so. Blogging, for instance. There has been some very smart writing recently on how, though the majority of blogs singled out for attention by the more traditional media is male-written, the majority of blogs, period, is overwhelmingly female-written. Livejournal, Diaryland, to a slighly lesser extent Blogger -- they are dominated by female discourse, often denigrated as such.
The focus on Myspace, too, tends to be on impressionable young women being spied upon by men -- as if female publishing is necessarily a dangerous act. (When we hear stories about dangerous male Myspace stuff, conversely, it doesn't revolve around them being put in danger, but them putting others in danger. They've usually got some sort of school shooting page or a threatening blog or something.)
I think so much of television is female-inflected too -- reality shows, especially. I haven't really thought this far enough through, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is some way that the new-old form of reading/writing I see in reality shows may have something to do with this question of revisionary female readership/writership.
This is all getting confused -- and would be aided by a little more critical reading on my part, but I'm definitely interested in pursuing it further.
Meanwhile, I ought to be a) reading Barnabe Riche: His Farewell to the Military Profession b) reading some Habermas (public sphere is useful!) c) grading the first set of papers for 381. But what I really want is to go take some pictures of abandoned places. But I will stick to a sensible plan: work first, trespass later. A good model.
Or maybe let's not even take that for granted. Why is it that we -- or at least I -- look to put a particularly binary-gendered spin on something that isn't even remotely anthropomorphic? Partially, I'm sure, it's the culture in which I have grown up. Identifying gender-troubled or trouble-causing gender aspects of anything is a good way to get praise for insight in our society. Not just me, but our whole social and critical world place a whole lot of emphasis on strict gender division -- and thus on its transgression.
But I also wonder if this has something also to do with public discourse, with enfranshisement through printed speech. We are tending to treat these fictional works as if they were revolutionary -- as, in many ways they were. They initiate a new category of public and publishable speech, of popular speech -- and I wonder if that automatically allies them with femaleness or female speaking.
That is not, of course, to say that the actual writers of these works were female (they weren't) or that they adopted female voices (they didn't -- until Moll Flanders) . It is, however, to suggest that new forms of public speech are perhaps extra-identified with femaleness, perhaps through being particularly attractive to women or particularly constructed around a female voice (sometimes a powerfully present voice, sometimes a powerfully absent voice).
If we think of public/published speaking as necessarily a dialogue, then it makes sense that a new form of speaking would be associated with subjugated or previously unheard speech, or with dangerous speech -- one way to figure forth that association is to think about women's voices and women's readership. I'm not quite pulling this out of my ass, entirely, either -- I definitely think there's an extra focus in the preferatory material we're reading on "lady readers" and an extra-transgressive place for female readers/speakers within the texts.
I'm also thinking of other new public speech forms, and whether they get female-identified too, and I suspect so. Blogging, for instance. There has been some very smart writing recently on how, though the majority of blogs singled out for attention by the more traditional media is male-written, the majority of blogs, period, is overwhelmingly female-written. Livejournal, Diaryland, to a slighly lesser extent Blogger -- they are dominated by female discourse, often denigrated as such.
The focus on Myspace, too, tends to be on impressionable young women being spied upon by men -- as if female publishing is necessarily a dangerous act. (When we hear stories about dangerous male Myspace stuff, conversely, it doesn't revolve around them being put in danger, but them putting others in danger. They've usually got some sort of school shooting page or a threatening blog or something.)
I think so much of television is female-inflected too -- reality shows, especially. I haven't really thought this far enough through, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is some way that the new-old form of reading/writing I see in reality shows may have something to do with this question of revisionary female readership/writership.
This is all getting confused -- and would be aided by a little more critical reading on my part, but I'm definitely interested in pursuing it further.
Meanwhile, I ought to be a) reading Barnabe Riche: His Farewell to the Military Profession b) reading some Habermas (public sphere is useful!) c) grading the first set of papers for 381. But what I really want is to go take some pictures of abandoned places. But I will stick to a sensible plan: work first, trespass later. A good model.
Labels: books, early modern, feminism, queer, reading
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