Last week, Heidi MacDonald wrote a lengthy post discussing the lack of women in The Comics Journal (especially the print version). R.Fiore, long-time Comics Journal writer, responded as follows:
The question I have is this. Suppose the Comics Journal website finds that it is getting enough content from a predominantly male pool of writers to satisfy its needs. What is the problem with that? I pose this strictly as a question. Commentators here seem to be assuming that the problem is self-evident, but it doesn’t seem quite so obvious to me.
I posted this in reply:
There are a number of reasons to try to get more women contributors, it seems like. First, and again, TCJ is still (as Heidi suggests) an important touchstone for comics criticism and for canon formation. When TCJ prints a massive article about Crumb’s lawyers rather than having anything at all about female cartoonists, it sends a message about what’s important. That message can matter (see Annie Murphy’s piece about how discouraging as a cartoonist she found tcj’s approach to female cartoonists.)
Perhaps more importantly, TCJ’s mission is to cover art comics. Failing to engage with female critics and female cartoonists is a failure of that mission. TCJ should do better in this regard (especially the print edition) because otherwise they are failing by their own standards.
Finally, the world remaining what it is, men and women are not treated equally, which means that women have experiences and perspectives which are different from men. Those perspectives are valuable in lots of ways. Paying attention to women can involve being more thoughtful about the role of gender in the work of all cartoonists; it can mean seeing women creators as more central and so having a different canon (say, focusing on the history of children’s book cartooning rather than on EC; or thinking about shoujo rather than superhero comics). Not that all women share common interests or anything, anymore than all men do (Qiana Whitted who writes for HU is very interested in EC as just one example.) But, gender and genre share a common root and have a certain amount to do with each other, and so including women will tend to have an effect on content, and help make tcj (esp. the print version) feel less like a guy’s locker room filled with aging hippies who can’t talk about anything other than Crumb.
In some ways the fact that you have to ask the question is symptomatic of the problem, maybe? This is feminism 101 stuff. Discussions of canon and inclusion are really old hat in literature and visual art. The fact that comics doesn’t get it makes comics look really backwards and staid and a more than a little ridiculous. If you care about comics being taken seriously as an art form (which is TCJ’s mission) then including women as writers and pieces about women is a no-brainer. Are comics art, or are they a nostalgic pastime for male hobbyists? If you want the answer to be the first of those, you need to include women. (And just to be clear, I take this as what Frank is saying in this piece, which is very much to his credit.)
Maybe just to expand a little bit…first, I should note that both Tim Hodler (tcj.com’s co-editor) and Frank Santoro (who writes the post where R. Fiore commented) are on the same page as me here in terms of thinking that more women contributors are important. Fiore’s arguments are Fiore’s and not (thankfully) the position of tcj.com.
Second, when I say that engaging with women as writers, cartoonists and readers is central to TCJ’s mission of seeing comics as art, what I mean is that, both academically and popularly, gender is, and has been for years, an important lens through which people judge and think about art. For an increasing number of audiences in an increasing number of venues, having something intelligent to say to half the population matters in terms of evaluating aesthetics. So when TCJ seems unable or unwilling to include women in the conversation, that suggests it, and comics, is an unserious, irrelevant backwater, rather than an art form that matters.It makes comics look more like video games than like visual art or literature.
To talk about HU, one of the things I’ve focused on consistently and deliberately is getting women to write here. I wouldn’t say this is altruistic, exactly; after all, HU doesn’t pay, and there are plenty of other places women comics critics can write if they’d like to, whether on tumblr or their own blogs or group sites like Manga Bookshelf. So when women (or men) write at HU, I’m pretty clear that they’re doing me a favor, not the other way around.
So the reason to get women to write on HU is not to promote women. Rather, the reason to get women on the site is, first of all, because there are lots of women who have interesting things to say about comics and art, and so it benefits the site to have them here. And, second of all, because I want a website and a community which includes different perspectives, including the perspectives of that half of the population which isn’t male.
For the print TCJ editor Gary Groth, this isn’t something to worry about. Gary (quoted by Heidi) says that he is “gender-blind when it comes to good writing. And to subject matter.” For Gary, there are, or should be, no consequential differences between men and women. This is a fairly popular position (and not just among men.) Equality is a worthy goal,and it’s easy (not necessary or even always logical, but easy) to go from an argument of equality to an argument of sameness. It’s tempting to say, well, we want men and women to be treated equally; therefore, the way to do that is to assume that they are in fact the same in every way that matters.
I don’t find this convincing, though. In her recent book Excluded, Julia Serano, who is a trans woman, and a biologist, argues that gender is a complex trait. What she means by this is that how people experience gender and sexuality — the things that make me a heterosexual white guy who doesn’t watch sports — are determined not by nature (the fact that I have a penis) or by nurture (the fact that my dad was our main caregiver) but by a combination of factors which aren’t easily predictable or reproducible.
Seeing gender as a complex trait is a way to avoid gender essentialism; since everyone’s experience of gender is individual, there’s no one trait that you can point to and say, women are (or should be) like that, or men are (or should be) like that. But it’s also a way to avoid what might be called an essentialism of absence; the insistence that gender makes (or should make) no difference at all. It’s true that neither biology nor culture are determinative. But it’s also true that both biology and culture matter. Individuality is a sign of complexity, not a sign that our bodies and our social milieu have no effect on us. And if, say, you’re mainstream comics, and 90% of your audience is male, or if you’re the print TCJ and Heidi has to go through with a magnifying glass to find evidence that women exist, that’s not a fluke or an accident. It’s not a result of being gender blind. On the contrary, it’s a gendered fact which has something important to do with the way you interact with people who are, for a complex of social and biological reasons, women.
Along those lines, I would say that the fact that it has been somewhat difficult to get women contributors here is an important indication that the effort to recruit them is actually important and worthwhile. As I said before, there are no lack of women critics writing all over the web. Yet, despite an active effort on my part, HU still skews quite male.
I don’t think it’s a mystery as to why that is. I’m a guy, and I got into comics criticism through writing at TCJ, so much of my initial audience and much of my social network for writing comics criticism skewed male. In addition, my interests and background are focused on male genre product. I grew up with superhero comics, and while I don’t exactly follow them anymore, coverage on this site still I think points in that direction to some degree. In addition, I have a quite confrontational and polemical writing style, and so does a fair amount of writing on the site. There are many women who are perfectly comfortable with that approach to blogging — certainly more than have any interest in superhero comics, if the demographic data are correct. But, still, I think my particular pugnacity is coded male in a lot of ways.
So the site has more male writers than female ones for a lot of reasons, and if I wanted I could just go with that and we’d have a boy’s club with, presumably, even more writing on Watchmen than we have already. And I like Watchmen (that’s why we have so much writing on it!) But over the long haul (or even over the short haul) I think that would get pretty boring. I want to have folks contribute who are interested in things I”m not, as well as in things I am. I want to have different perspectives, not people telling me all the time what I want to hear. I want, in short, to have people on the site write about race in cosplay even though — or rather especially because — I don’t know a ton about and certainly don’t participate in cosplay. I want to hear Caro talk about why Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s take on female authenticity and the body is important, even though I have little interest in Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and never thought at all about the relation of the body to authenticity. I want to have folks write about the history of yaoi and bishonen in Japan, even if I don’t read a ton of yaoi. And obviously, men could write about all those things. But the fact is that they’re all gendered topics, that they’re all presented from a specifically female perspective, and that they all appeared on the site because women wrote about them.
To put it another way, deliberately reaching out to women writers is not in opposition to, in Gary’s words, “good writing”. Rather, having women writers, in my view, is central to making the site worthwhile, challenging, and relevant — and when I fail to do that, the site is less worthwhile, challenging and relevant than it should be. I don’t want my own limited relationship to biology and culture to be the be all and end all of what the site can be about, because that’s stifling. It’s not a matter of saying, well, I’m a feminist, so HU needs to represent women. Rather, it’s a matter of believing in the feminist proposition that women have valuable things to say.
Erica Friedman had this comic inside her high school locker because the woman on the front reminded her of a fan-fic character she wrote. Erica’s essay about it is here.
Gender issues in comics (and similar male dominated mediums) are like a giant elephant men like Groth and Fiore pretend not to see by claiming to be “gender blind” or ignorant of the issue. Asking why it’s a problem to begin with has the appearance of a classic derailing tactic – get the debate so bogged down in a definition war that the actual problem can never be addressed.
If you’re “gender blind” that can’t account for male domination of a field where women’s voices are being silenced by passive lack of inclusion, and an unwillingness to even talk about the problem. If you’re ignorant of the problem, perhaps you’re not qualified to talk about it because there are tons of people who’ve put years of discussion and study into it. Educating yourself out of ignorance can’t involve derailing real conversations about the things you’re educating yourself about, because that’s going to just add to the size of the invisible elephant.
This morning, a young man online said to me that he has no female role models because they are female and their experience is irrelevant to him. *This* is the problem, not women being shrewish, but men who think of women as so intrinsically “other” that there is no empathy for them as human beings at all.
Regarding the Journal, one name has been strangely absent from this discussion, or at least what I’ve seen of it: Cat Yronwode. Before she became a publisher and an enemy of the Journal (or so it seems, correct me if this has changed in recent years) she wrote some really great stuff for them, including the definitive (to my mind) article on Jack Chick’s Crusaders comics.
Hey John. Nice to see you over here. I agree that Fiore was not entirely asking in good faith. I think he did raise issues that can be sticking points for others, so it seemed worth talking about.
Erica, that’s really depressing. I think it’s not just thinking of women as other, but the assumption that you can’t learn anything of value from people who have different experiences.
Dan, I’ve heard of Yronwode, but haven’t read any of her work. Has the Journal reprinted anything? Or is she online?
Hi Noah. I wasn’t putting you down for answering his questions, as you listed your answers here, and didn’t derail.
The “why is feminism important?” question still needs to be answered often to educate the ignorant, or in this case, disarm someone who’s derailing. It’s just sad that it does.
She’s been online for quite a while, I think this is the main portal to her online presence:
http://www.luckymojo.com/
A bit nineties looking, no? This page gives an overview of her many and varied interests:
http://www.luckymojo.com/cat.html
She also seems to be pretty active on Twitter.
Oh, and how about Trina Robbins? Also relevant to the creator/critic thread come to think of it.
I don’t remember Cat eve writign for the Journal. She wrote for the Rival TBG whose owner had a teenaged feud with Gary that went on and on. In fact, I pretty much think Cat and the Journal were ALWAYS mortal enemies.
Lost in all the recent kerfuffle (nice job keeping it alive, Noah!) was this comment from R. Fiore in the VERY ill-advised reprinting of the WEni Lee debacle from 1989:
http://www.tcj.com/blood-and-thunder-the-complete-i-am-not-terry-beattys-girlfriend-debate/#comment-304978
>>>I recall a dinner we had during the San Diego Comicon back in the ’80s. Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly and I think Jules Feiffer were part of the party. The discussion turned to Cat Yronwode, who was something of an antagonist in our minds at that time, and after listening to some of our characteristic slagging a nonplussed Mouly said, “What has this woman done to you?” It was a little like Jane Goodall interrupting a band of gorillas in a feces-slinging session.
Just for the record, Cat Yronwode, flaws and all, is MY Carter Scholz, a brilliant writer with a scholar’s knowledge of comics without whom I would never have dared think my voice would be heard.
Noah I appreciate you efforts here (for reals) but it does kind of come down to “Why should women be heard? Because they are so people, too!” which is kind of self evident. It is sad that such things even need to be defended.
I hope someone asks Gary about this at some point, and doesn’t let him slip off the hook.
Essentialism doesn’t have to be about one defining characteristic, or even an additive model of single, atomistic characteristics. It could be multiplicative and an interactive process. Likewise, there’s nothing that limits essentialism to being solely about nature — there’s plenty of essentialists when it comes to socially created games, such as baseball not being the same as basketball, or the functions of ideology, such as radical feminist views on what constitutes masculinity and femininity. (Nor does essence have to be eternally static, but that’s not so important for my point here.) Anyway, you’re talking out both sides of your mouth when you insist on a radically anti-essentialist, individual variation on how gender is instantiated in each person and a determinative social problem of excluding a certain group based on characteristics that have to be shared by each member of that group in order make any sense on the problem being social. Clearly, the social institution (in this case, comics criticism, or more particularly, TCJ’s print edition) has certain characteristics that interact with certain characteristics that exist out there in the population of potential contributors that results in a male skew. For this to be manifested with any sort of regularity that you or anyone else can deem a problem, there has to be something of an essence on both sides: TCJ’s model reader and its actual contributors versus its potential readers and contributors. To deny any essence here is deny any regularity, which means you’ve nothing to complain about, since the skew is a random occurrence, or it’s noumenal, or comes down to God’s fiat, so talk to Him (or Her).
Good grief. All these feuds I didn’t even know about…
Heidi, it is depressing that you have to say the same thing over and over and over and over, and it seems self-evident in the first place.
Well, I’m trying to say that denying any essence is itself essentialist; the radical absence of presence is in fact a radical presence of absence. To insist on no essence is to claim that the essence is nothing, which is a strong essential claim.
I don’t think arguing for complexity is talking out of both sides of my mouth, nor that it’s contradictory logically. Rather, I’m saying that reality is contradictory and confusing, and that recognizing that involves allowing for individual variation without denying that because of biology and society, gender is an important aspect of the self.
If you’re trying to make any coherent argument for there being a male skew in comics criticism, then you have to define some essential aspects about the groups involved (e.g., male critics, female critics, the fandom milieu, etc.).
I’m not seeing your argument for the reason behind this skew as being all that complex: it’s because the excluded are women. It’s even self-evident, you say. And, my point is, that you must have some notion of the essential characteristics here that make you aware of who are the women and who are not. Complexity usually causes a problem to be less self-evident.
Heidi,
My research shows that Cat Yronwode wrote several pieces for the Journal, including stuff in issues 42, 44, 46, 47 and 50. Issue 50 has the great “Blackhawks For Christ” article about Jack Chick’s Crusaders. Her premise (IIRC) was that Chick was essentially writing about a mythos, Christianity, that she didn’t particularly subscribe to but found intriguing.
BTW, by “research” I mean this:
http://www.google.com/webhp?nord=1#nord=1&q=yronwode+site:tcj.com
BTW, I’ve always found Gary Groth’s various feuds and his tendency to make them public a massive turn-off and a huge stumbling block whenever I’m defending him and the Journal to people.
Gender is complex; whether the journal is excluding women and the ethical stance to take on that less so.
I’m not anti-essentialist. In fact, I’m arguing that being radically anti-essentialist is problematic because it’s too essentialist.
I don’t think the existence of women as a category means that women has to be essentialist, necessarily. It could be a rule of thumb category that has strong descriptive power. I think that works fine.
Anyway, I enjoy the theoretical discussion, but we seem to agree on the substantive point, here, which is that the lack of representation of women in the print journal isn’t an accident.
Yes, we do.
It’s a new century, essentialism and realism are back in!
Either your rule of thumb description has to actually link up to something real about the target of the description out there, i.e. the women, or you’re just talking about what’s in your head. Do they, the objective entities we’re calling ‘women,’ have any of the characteristics in your mental description or don’t they? Strong descriptive power that doesn’t apply to anything with any regularity isn’t very strong, or descriptive.
Anyway, I’ll drop this, so others can get back to a discussion of why women aren’t more prevalent in comics criticism …
“Do they, the objective entities we’re calling ‘women,’ have any of the characteristics in your mental description or don’t they?”
See, setting it up this way gets you into trouble. Some women have penises. Some women have various combinations of chromosomes. Some women like superhero comics.
It’s not an objective category;it’s not a subjective category. It’s a social category which has elements of subjectivity and objectivity, biology and culture. Trying to nail it down just ends up excluding people unnecessarily. You can talk about these matters in terms of rule of thumb knowledge and a willingness to be flexible. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to be proscriptive to acknowledge that the messy reality is still stable enough that for purposes of a discussion like this one, gender differences matter and need to be addressed.
I don’t think you’re off-topic, fwiw. I did talk about gender theory in the piece, and think it’s relevant. My effort to figure out where I stand in relationship to essentialism is still kind of tentative, so I don’t mind being forced to think it through more clearly.
If some women have penises, then you need to make an argument why none of the penises writing on TCJ’s print edition are not women. Barring such an argument, your belief works against your argument about the magazine’s exclusivity? Maybe Heidi should’ve specified that she was only talking about women without penises or that only have an XX chromosomal structure (which would still require some determining features to make any sense of her point).
And, again, essence doesn’t just apply to what’s biological: you can be an essentialist about social categories.
That’s cool, Noah, I’m just thinking through this stuff, too.
delete the “not” from “not women”
Trans women are women. (Like Cat Yronwode, I believe.) The guys writing for tcj don’t identify or live as women. And, yes, “identify” and “live as women” are fuzzy categories. That doesn’t invalidate them or make them useless.
Could you explain a little more how social categories can be essential? Usually essentialism is linked to biology in these discussions. Social categories are seen as things that are more fluid and can be changed, or as not belonging to individual essence.
I don’t much care what you call trans women (I’ll refer to anyone however he or she prefers — within reason, e.g., I’m not going to completely alter all pronouns and spellings for the request of a few radicals), but there’s a clear difference that simply applying the term ‘woman’ doesn’t erase. Otherwise, you’d being stating a useless tautology with “trans women are women.” Isn’t it pretty self-evident that it doesn’t mean the same thing as “women are women”? This shouldn’t be that controversial, but I understand why it is: there’s a lot of bigotry against transgender people. There shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t change the objective difference.
I don’t believe Cat Yronwode is trans, though.
Yeah, I second that disbelief re: Cat Yronwode.
Groth’s “gender-blind” comment was startlingly (to switch disability metaphors) tone deaf — that’s how everyone complicit in institutional exclusion thinks of themselves. There’s no surer sign that the person is, in fact, not at all blind to gender (or race or whatever), to the point of cliche.
And thanks to Heidi for reminding everyone of tcj’s decision to reprint without comment that Terry Beatty’s girlfriend thing. WTF were they thinking?
Not sure why “trans women are women” implies there is some important difference or caveat there? Women who like superhero comics are women too. I don’t even know that there are that many more of the latter than there are of the former. Women firefighters are women. Black women are women. Lesbians are women. Etc. None of those are tautological, that I can see.
Certain women’s status as “women” is contested in various ways. Asserting that that’s false isn’t tautological, nor does it confirm that the bigots are right, just as saying “women are equal” doesn’t prove that women are unequal. It just shows that there are bigots who contest that statement; that is isn’t self-evident, even if it should be.
Okay, I must be wrong about yronwode then (who wikipedia tells me is supposed to be lowercase). Where the hell did I hear that? Oh well; I stand corrected.
I still don’t find any of this all that controversial or particularly difficult to suss out, Noah. If you want to say that trans women are members of the category WOMAN, that’s cool. The point is that it still doesn’t erase the objective difference within that category between ‘transwoman’ and ‘non-trans woman’ (lesbians, blacks, firefighters and/or superhero fans who were born without a penis) — the latter typically being used as the (unmarked) exemplar for the category in discussions of sexism that involve the exclusion of “women.”
But the marking is social, and an example of bigotry. (Serano’s actually very good about this.) I mean, there are times and places in which lesbians, or black women, have actually been singled out as unfeminine or not women. It doesn’t show that the unmarked category is real or essential; it just shows that essentialism can be used to mark people out for prejudice.
If we ever get Delany’s heterotopia on Triton, the above will no longer apply.
Acknowledging differences is not in itself an example of bigotry. Your thinking a woman looks trans is a sign of bigotry? What about thinking a woman looks black, because she is? Or maybe a black woman is mistaken for white. To pretend that we see no differences is some crazy Maoist kind of shit. Or maybe it’s like Groth saying he’s gender blind.
No, no. The differences exist; the question is, what differences matter and why? Again, Serano is really great on this (you should get her book.) She points out that there aren’t any fewer sex workers than there are accountants, statistically. But being a sex worker means that you are marked; you need to explain yourself and justify yourself. Being an accountant is “normal”, not because everyone is an accountant, but because accountants are not seen as anything special.
So the point is not that trans women are no different than other women. But there isn’t any objective reason that that difference should be more important than saying that women who are accountants are different than other women. The reason it is seen as more consequential is about stigma and bias, rather than about anything natural or essential to the categories of women or trans women.
The tricky part is that, the stigma and bias being in place, it isn’t then sufficient to do what Gary does and say, well, I’m just not going to see this, therefore it won’t exist. Marking socially is the first step towards discrimination, but refusing to acknowledge the marking is not then an adequate response, in part because the marking and the effects of the marking are real and can’t just be wished away. Which is part of the reason why discussions about essentialism are so fraught.
I just might get that book, but it’ll be a good long while (based on my current stacks).
If you’re a person who believes that the woman’s voice will somehow contribute something that isn’t being contributed by men speaking (or writing), then it would seem that you’d have to acknowledge some difference between women speaking out and transwomen speaking out. If all the writers of the last TCJ suddenly got a sex change, you wouldn’t think Heidi’s criticism would then be rendered otiose.
“you’d have to acknowledge some difference between women speaking out and transwomen speaking out.”
??? That doesn’t track at all. If the men were women, or decided to be women, they’d all be really different people. Gender isn’t something you doff like a cap (Delany’s fantasies aside.) You’re saying, well, if all the men who wrote for tcj were women, then Heidi’s criticisms wouldn’t apply. And sure, they wouldn’t. But the men who wrote for tcj were men.
I think queer perspectives are important too, and try to have trans and gay people writer here too. But the trans women who have written here aren’t separate from my goal of getting more women to write for HU.
“If the men were women, or decided to be women, they’d all be really different people.”
So there’s something essentially different in the way women see things and the way men see them? And what determines whether someone is a man or woman has to do with whether they see things according to these essential categories of masculine and feminine that you believe in? In that case, what you really want is for more feminine voices, regardless of whether they come from male or female bodies.
Well, what I’m saying in the piece is that essentialism is hard to pin down. But I’m also saying that male and female voices have something to do with bodies…and something to do with culture (and I’d also say that being a trans person is certainly in part biological just like being gay is. Trans people’s gender identities are as much rooted in biology as yours or mine — which is to say, they are somewhat and complexly rooted in both biology and culture.)
“denying any essence is itself essentialist; the radical absence of presence is in fact a radical presence of absence. To insist on no essence is to claim that the essence is nothing, which is a strong essential claim.”
Not to distract you two from your perennial merry-go-round, but this claim struck me as prima facie either silly or trivial.
Silly: Suppose you say “All multiples of 10 are also prime numbers.” I say “You’re mistaken, no multiples of 10 are also prime numbers”. And you say “Ah — but you yourself are making a claim about prime numbers, you’re saying that multiples of 10 do have primehood. It’s just a primehood of absence — itself a strong primehood claim.” WHAT
In general — to say that category C does not have the property P is not to say that category C has the property P of absence. It’s to say that category C does not have the property P.
Trivial: to say that category C does not have the property P, you have to use the words “property P”; a sentence in which you deny P-hood of C is a sentence in which (explicitly or implicitly) the word for P-hood must appear. Well, yes.
Charles and Noah —
This was a very neat discussion to follow. I wish I had time to participate. Right now, all I can throw in is to point out that one cannot think of the modifier “trans” in “transwoman” the same way you think about the modifier “black” in “black woman” (or “accountant woman,” “conservative woman,” “rich woman,” etc.).
In the latter case(s), the modifier — if it means anything — is independent from the central category: a woman can stop being an accountant, rich, or black, without ceasing to be a woman. In the former case, however, the modifier is not independent: being “trans” is what makes the “trans woman” a woman. If she stopped being trans — or perhaps more accurately and problematically, if she never had become trans — it’s hard to imagine how she would still be a woman.
Of course… as I type this (and the clock ticks), I can imagine a reply that the pre-trans or non-trans woman could still be a woman — but only if there was some inner thing (some essence) that it meant to be a woman. This non-trans woman is still a woman — is, indeed, she is always, already a transwoman — because something inside her is essentially a woman.
Oh… and there should be more women writing for TCJ.
Well played, Jones. Maybe my own spin on the merry-go-round would have been easier if I had put it like this:
Is the sentence “Trans women are women” more like:
“Happy rich people are rich people” or
“Wealthy rich people are rich people”?
Time to go…
Daniel — Huh, I had totally forgotten that! My mind is totally blwon because I do know there was a feud after that, which as the Fiore anecdote shows, was very pervasive.
As a kid it really bothered me, BTW. Gary was my publisher and friend, and cat was my idol, and the fact they hated each other was an ideological divorce.
Cat is definitely a lifelong lady, BTW.
Interesting to hear your perspective on that Heidi. And if I may say, if Groth vs. yronwode etc. was the Journal at its worst to my young mind, then “Alas, Poor Claremont, I Knew Him Well” was surely the Journal at its best, right up there with cat’s “Blackhawks For Christ”, I’d say!
Jones, the analytic philosophy is cute, but not really applicable in this case. Discussions about existence aren’t discussions about prime numbers. Presence and absence aren’t intellectual categories that can be usefully mapped by algebra. In short, your analogies don’t work.
You either have something or you have nothing. Is nothing something? Western and other philosophies have struggled with that question basically forever. You can’t make it go away by assigning it a letter.
Peter, most trans women, yes, actually feel that they’ve always been women. Transitioning isn’t that big a deal in terms of identity (that is, lots of trans women don’t get operations). So what makes them women isn’t that they are in the category trans that you can take away. What makes them women is that they’re women.
Also…of course you can always find differences, it seems like. You could say that lesbian women are different in essence because sexuality is central to gender, or that women who are economists are different because economists are uniquely evil, or whatever. I’m not denying that differences exist. I’m saying that the ones you decide are important are important because you’re decided that, not because there’s some sort of objective reality which declares that being a trans woman is a more important difference than being an accountant.
Re: Gary and feuds. Didn’t he feud with virtually everyone at one point or another? He and Jim Shooter were buddies at one point too, weren’t they?
I don’t know whether it was pre- or post-feud, but Cat Yronwode’s Eclipse Comics used to advertise in The Comics Journal. I just came across an unintentionally amusing full-page Eclipse ad in TCJ #96 (March 1985). It features a photograph of woman in her 30s or 40s wearing a business suit with shoulder pads and looking at the reader with her hand placed thoughtfully on her chin. Next to her is the headline, “I grew up! But my favorite comic book didn’t.” Then there’s a long block of text (over 200 words) about her childhood love of and adult estrangement from comics, until, “…One day, a friend told me about the new comics. Modern comics. Comics with good art… And best of all, these new comics featured new heroes, new concepts, and a new kind of commitment to excellence… Yes, I rediscovered comics. But not just any comics. I discovered Eclipse Comics.” I realize that Eclipse did publish some good stuff (including Alan Moore and early Chris Ware), but I like the idea that after a hectic day of high-powered meetings, this woman would go home to her well-furnished apartment, pour some wine, and relax with the latest issues of Airboy and Sabre. Man, I wish I had a scanner so I could share this.
(This post isn’t that off-topic, come to think of it.)
I remember that ad, but Eclipse was also publishing (I think) Aztec Ace, ZOT and Air Boy, whose relationship with Valkyrie cat though made it more woman friendly.
Dan, thanks for the kind words on my long past work.
I was going to the FedEx store anyway, so I went ahead and scanned it there.
http://tinyurl.com/l2734s3
I don’t know, Heidi. Does she look like an Airboy fan to you?
Noah, I’m showing up at the party late as usual, so I’m skipping over a lot of content in the comments, but I still feel the need to state the obvious: Your essay was a very good answer to Fiore’s question.
I’m perturbed by the growing witchhunt atmosphere on HU in this matter.
Look to the record in TCJ.Look at the cover stories/interviews with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Sharon Rudahl,Francoise Mouly,Phoebe Gloeckner,Alison Bechdel,Wendi Pini,Debbie Drechsler, Carol Lay, etc.Articles or interviews — Dame Darcy, Lynn Johnston, Trina Robbins, Ramona Fradon — appreciations of Jackie Ormes and Tarpe Mills…I could go on and on.
Gary Groth is not the enemy of women.
??? What the hell, Alex? Nobody is on a witchhunt; nobody says he’s the enemy of women. We said (and I stand by this) that he has done, especially recently, a crappy job of getting women to write for tcj.
I also said in the piece that tcj.com appears to be on the same page in wanting to get more women contributors.
Gary has done lots to promote female cartoonists. That doesn’t change the fact that tcj often feels like a boys’ club, and that Gary’s efforts to excuse that don’t reflect well on him.
Noah, my remarks are addressed to the overall tone of the past week’s comments and articles, both here and at Heidi’s blog. It’s a cumulative effect. I’ve been reading tcj for 36 years. A new reader would get a very false view of the magazine based on these recent writings, particularly since there are several errors of fact asserted (though, to be fair, mostly corrected).
Well, Heidi’s piece seemed to do a pretty good job of showing that new readers of tcj are going to see very few women in its pages; she was suggesting that it’s gotten worse.
Jones,
I wonder if you can’t apply the same sort of rationale to the old dismissal of relativism: “see, you just made an absolutist claim: there are no absolutes.”
Noah,
My intuition is that it’s not very often in the (let’s confine it to) straight male population that when one of us (maybe you) sits down to watch porn with women in it “decide” between trans or the traditionally defined women. The one subject doesn’t work on the male viewer who is attracted to the other. This isn’t all that different to “most trans women, yes, actually feel that they’ve always been women.” In other words, they don’t decide to suddenly become women, and many (I’m betting most) straight men don’t decide to be attracted only to traditionally defined women. This isn’t reducible to conscious decisions about what’s important.
Peter,
I think you’re right about ‘trans’. Another related difference between say, ‘lesbian woman’ and ‘trans woman’ is that the former has to do with behaviors, but the latter with the physical makeup. (Granted, there’s a debate on the physical basis for the former’s behaviors, but it’s still about the behaviors, nonetheless.)
Charles, making some sort of absolutist claim on the basis of whether people are or are not attracted to an extremely stigmatized and loathed group seems kind of crazy. Also, porn is supposed to define trans women? You don’t see why that might not be really misogynist and just generally shitty?
Also, you are wildly generalizing about which straight guys are attracted or not to trans women. I would suggest that you have basically no idea what you’re talking about here. Talk to some trans sex workers and then maybe get back to me. Also, you’re assuming that you can always tell when you’re attracted to a trans woman. That woman you see on the street who you think is hot? She could easily be trans, just as she could easily be an accountant. The fact that whether she’s trans matters more to you than whether she’s an accountant is about you and your prejudices, not about anything innate about trans people.
Your distinction between “lesbian” and “trans” makes no sense. Trans people are identified by behaviors as well; arguably primarily by behaviors, since trans people are trans because they live and identify as the gender they are.
If you’re going to talk about this stuff, I would urge you to actually try to read something about it before you start making proclamations. Again, Julia Serano’s books area great place to start. I feel like you’re trying to discuss this in good faith and without prejudice, but basing your ideas on your own experiences (i.e., what porn you like to watch) is really not a substitute for listening to what trans people themselves have to say about their lives.
Regarding Alex’s comment, I think his perception is probably due to the way much of the commentary has focused on a sort of subjective criticism, rather than structural one (Annie Murphy’s post turned blog entry is a good example). If Heidi and any number of male comics bloggers were to send in articles to the Journal, she’d stand a better chance of getting in there, which suggests that there isn’t a subjective bias (people there dismiss women because they’re women) going on. The structural commentary can be seen in the reaction to Gary Groth’s gender blindness (sort of like “I don’t see color … everything is black and white.”)
I think RSM was talking about this in the tcj comments thread. There certainly isn’t a policy of active exclusion at tcj. As you say, we’re talking about structural factors and (avowed) blindness.
The porn stuff had to do with your commentary on what the “status quo” decides is important — that’s why it was carefully delimited to straight males.
I’ve read plenty on categorization, cognition and how it works. Have you? That doesn’t really change because of sexual preferences and the like.
And what have the trans women sex workers told you during your conversations with them? I live in neighborhood with many of them hanging around, so I’ll see if they agree.
You’re talking about trans people’s lives. I’m suggesting there’s an ethical obligation to actually think about what they have to say about those lives if you’re going to do that.
If you did, you would avoid sweeping statements about what straight men do or don’t like in their porn. You’d also perhaps have some sense of the extent to which trans women are sexualized, and why talking about their identities in terms of what porn straight guys like to watch is really problematic.
People’s turn ons are people’s turn ons. However, suggesting that sexual desire doesn’t have anything to do with social stigma strikes me as extremely naive, and, indeed, essentialist.
You don’t have to read much from trans women sex workers to find out that there are many, many straight guys who are attracted to trans women.
My basic point without all the nonsense is that any solution to problems rooted in categorical differences isn’t going to be solved by ignoring those differences and expecting others to get in line. This is your solution, Noah, but to me it’s disingenuous. I don’t believe that you see no difference and that you chose to see no difference. That’s nonsensical.
There are many straight men who are attracted to trans women. I’ve found some attractive, in fact. My point was that they see a difference. They make a categorical distinction. If you want trans porn, then you’re going to be disappointed with the non-trans porn.
For fuck’s sake, how many times do I have to say this? of course there are differences. The point is that the extent to which and the ways in which those differences matter is not a truth handed down by god. Many people in the not too distant past had visceral negative reactions to black people (some still do, if George Zimmerman is any indication). Those reactions felt natural and like part of their selves, right? But those reactions are still unjust and evil; treating black people’s difference as if it matters in that way is wrong.
The point isn’t that there are no differences. The point is that people shouldn’t be stigmatized for their differences. I can tell the difference between women who are accountants and women who aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that I stigmatize women who are accountants. The fact that you can make a distinction between trans women as a kind of difference and women who are accountants as a kind of difference is just saying that, yes, different people are different in different ways.
Acknowledging difference doesn’t have to mean accepting stigma as legitimate or right. On the contrary, I think acknowledging difference (between, say, men and women, which is what I do in this piece) is vital to getting rid of stigma and to treating people equally. Accepting difference doesn’t mean denying difference or pretending difference doesn’t exist. It means accepting difference.
” If you want trans porn, then you’re going to be disappointed with the non-trans porn.”
You’re assuming that all people make these categorical distinctions in this way. They don’t. Julia Serano talks in her latest book about dating many straight guys whose reaction to her is basically, well, I like women, you’re a women, why shouldn’t I like you? The categorical distinction you’re making is categorical in your head, maybe, and maybe in other people’s heads, but it’s not categorical by any means in everyone’s head. You’re insisting that there’s some sort of universal important difference, but it’s not universal or important for everyone, which suggests strongly that it is not universal, nor as important as you’re claiming.
In fact, Serano says that she’s dated straight men and bi-women and trans people, but that the one group of people that are not interested in dating her are lesbians. This is not about a categorical difference having to do with her, but (she makes a strong case) with long-standing lesbian politics and stigma against trans women.
Also, and again, just as you can’t tell a woman is an accountant by looking at her, you can’t tell a woman is trans by looking at her. The idea that the difference is something that is always obvious and determinative is simply objectively false, and a sign of your own preconceptions, not of anything having to do with trans women.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing with me about. I don’t agree trans people should be discriminated against in any fashion. Whereas, you say:
The point is that people shouldn’t be stigmatized for their differences. I can tell the difference between women who are accountants and women who aren’t, but that doesn’t mean that I stigmatize women who are accountants. The fact that you can make a distinction between trans women as a kind of difference and women who are accountants as a kind of difference is just saying that, yes, different people are different in different ways.
How is that a point against anything I’ve said here? It’s completely irrelevant, since no where did I imply or directly state that because there is a difference, that means one side of the difference is less a human. The only way I can see it as relevant is because you, in your tendency towards hysteria, want to believe that acknowledging differences is in itself a form of bigotry. But I don’t believe it’s a form of discrimination to see a difference between trans women and women, even thought that difference is the basis on which discrimination occurs. You brought up the example in a discussion about categorization and the need for some sort of essentialism. Every bit of my argument has been about that, really, except when trying to redirect us from the hysterical course that you’re always hellbent on following.
And though you acknowledge that differences are there, your solution to the problems of discrimination are to pretend like there are no differences (X is a P, the end). That will never work. Instead we all have to do the more difficult project of figuring out when differences matter and when they don’t. Yes, I know, you talk about differences that matter and don’t, but only as a form of ideological oppression. Instead, it’s a necessity of life that we can’t escape. What I’m getting from you is that categorization is something we need to overcome in order to live in some imagined utopia.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, the italics should end after the second paragraph (which is a quote from Noah). The rest is all mine, for better or worse.
I’m willing to acknowledge differences. I agree that figuring out what differences matter and why and how to deal with that is important. I think that the particular way you’re categorizing differences in terms of trans women is based in ignorance and stigma, in large part caused by the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re assuming people can always tell trans women from cis women. They can’t. You’re assuming people categorize their desire by whether people are cis or trans. They don’t. You’re attempting to argue for categorical difference based on straight male porn viewing habits, without any reference to stigma or to the history of sexualizing women and trans women.
I am arguing specifically that trans women, as a stigmatized, marked, discriminated class, have a particular history and experience, and that engaging with that experience is in fact vital if you’re going to treat them as equal. You say that you want to acknowledge difference, but you get huffy when I suggest that you need to do some work on engaging with this particular difference if you don’t want to spout offensive stuff.
Does that make sense? I think we agree on most of the theoretical issues, more or less, but I’m telling you that trans is a difference that really matters, and that assuming you can extrapolate about it without doing more reading and listening and thinking is getting you in trouble.
“The categorical distinction you’re making is categorical in your head, maybe, and maybe in other people’s heads, but it’s not categorical by any means in everyone’s head. You’re insisting that there’s some sort of universal important difference”
As Heidegger would say, Being recedes. Or as we know from old blind men, there are many ways to grope an elephant. Simply because not everyone and everything touches upon the Real in the same way, it doesn’t mean everything purely exists in the head. If many people can consistently make a distinction between two things, then there is a distinction to be made, even if tons of other entities don’t acknowledge it. This is one metaphysical lesson I’d draw from the old color category experiments of Berlin and Kay: Many cultures don’t make all the distinctions in color that other cultures do, but the color distinctions are still there. Likewise, maybe bats don’t know it, but we humans do.
I don’t imagine we’ll progress any with this discussion, and I’m at a point where I’m referencing Heidegger, so that’s enough from me …
Noah, that was written before I read your last comment. I’m going to let it drop, but, honestly, I don’t get what you’re saying here: “I’m telling you that trans is a difference that really matters” when this whole discussion came about because I said trans made a difference.
I’ll try one more time, I guess….
My original point in the post is that there are differences between men and women. Those differences are complex; they involve culture and biology, which aren’t easily separated. Those categories don’t determine what any individual will do. Nonetheless, they’re important, and so engaging with them and including women matters.
I would say the same thing for trans people.
The problem comes, for me, not in that you say that there are differences, but that your effort to parse those differences isn’t actually done through any engagement with difference. You’re applying categories, and attempting to define difference, without actually being engaged with the difference you’re attempting to define. This is where essentialism becomes problematic, I would say.
As an example. You would not, I don’t think, say, “we can tell that black people and white people are different from each other because white people don’t like porn with black people in it.” That would seem horribly reductive. It would also seem obviously wrong, for many of the same reasons that (as I pointed out) it’s wrong when talking about trans people. It also is a bad argument and insulting because there’s a long history of stigma and oppression which involves systematic devaluation of black people’s appearance, as well as systematic sexualization and fetishization. You know enough about racial history to understand that the differences there make this not just a bad argument, but an offensive one. You don’t (apparently) know enough about the history or circumstances of trans women to see that the badness and the offensiveness applies in that case as well. That’s a failure on your part to understand and engage with difference, I would argue — even though (especially though?) you’re undertaking the argument in the name of difference.
I agree with you that difference exists, and that treating people with respect involves not ignoring those differences, but responding thoughtfully and consciously to them. It also involves accepting, I think, that those differences aren’t easy to pin down. And it involves not essentializing your own prejudices and ideas. So when I say, lots of people don’t respond to these issues the way you do, you shouldn’t then take Heidegger and say, those people are an aberration, and I’m right. Rather, you need to accept that differences aren’t as easily articulatable as you want them to be, which doesn’t mean the differences don’t exist, but does mean that you need to respect difference by dealing with the fact that you may not be able to define it, and certainly shouldn’t be so sure of your definitions that you feel you can ignore counter-evidence, through whatever philosophical means.
Hope that’s somewhat clearer….
This is the conundrum with essentialism, I think. Without a recognition of difference, you just erase the difference, which in practice means that you insist everybody deal with your shit and that you never have to deal or engage with theirs. But as soon as you start asserting difference, you start putting people into boxes, and those boxes are really likely to be influenced by prejudice and stigma. That’s why I’m trying to put forward a way to think about difference that involves accepting that people are different while insisting that that difference not be strictly defined.
If I follow correctly, Noah understands difference as relative and contingent… A person’s identity exists relative to a person’s relationship to others in a particular situation. Charles, on the other hand, considers difference relative and also fairly stable, since types of people and situations recur and co-occur. Where Noah sees danger in reducing people to types, Charles sees danger in becoming so beholden to particulars that you can’t make a coherent structural argument. Both concerns seem like they can be legit or overblown depending on circumstance.
Hey Nate. You’re making me the relativist and Charles the essentialist, which I don’t know is quite right. I think male/female as categories are as stable as anything is likely to be. I think it’s important to acknowledge that the content o that binary is really hard to pin down.
I was wondering if the discussions about genre might be helpful; that is, “women” is not something you define structurally or formally, but is something that exists through various rule-of-thumb similarities, some of which are biological and some of which are cultural.
Hi Noah,
Yes, I am aware that the standard story of translife is that “I was already a woman (or man) inside.” And this is the very story that make people who are averse to essentialism sometimes have a problem with some narratives of trans-identity.
My point was simply to put another turn of the screw on Charles’ arguments about the inescapability of some kind of essence of “womanness.” In fact, I was arguing (at the end) that the essence of woman becomes so strong that the it may make the “trans” part of the equation completely optional/disposable: your man-ness or woman-ness is now a part of your soul — or a deeply engrained part of your biology, indistinguishable from the soul. It has little to do with how you act, what you have experienced, or even how you feel; it’s part of who you — male or female — are.
I didn’t mean to assert that Charles was an essentialist, which to me assumes categories like man/woman to be inherent or biological so much as reasonably stable, or at least stable enough to base conclusions on them. The stability could issue from cultural frameworks or ideological apparatuses as from biology or angels, but with the exception of a hard core relativists (which I do not believe includes you) and certain evolutionary psychologists and religious fundamentalists (which I do not think includes Charles), most people fall somewhere between the poles of concern I cite above. Having seen this argument play out here and elsewhere, (and many, many times), I’ve noticed that coarse distinctions between relativism and essentialism don’t get us very far toward working through the theoretical or practical questions at hand or raising new, interesting questions (I could not care less about whether these things end with agreement). Instead, it almost always devolves into an argument over who is a) the bigger essentialist, or b) who is more out of touch with reality, or c) both.
Credit where credit is due, I think you did a really good job in the article and this comment is about my being frustrated with a trap that I know I fall into sometimes, and that I’ve seen derail more than a few promising conversations.
Nate – good job on catching the derail – Noah posts about an article by a woman about a lack of women in a comics news org, and Charles derails the whole thing into a debate about essentialism and trans porn.
Was learning about the issue too much work here? There’s tons of space on the internet to start a discussion about gender essentialism, and you could probably even find some trans academics to join in, because very little about the debate here has anything substantive to do with the issue of Heidi’s original article. We’re not even talking about how gender is a lens in art, for goodness sake. There are lots of points Noah is making in the OP that could be addressed in context, and even with some academic/philosophical jargon if that’s your bag.
Instead, we get a discussion of “What If: All the men writing for TCJ were trans?!” (Picture Uatu in a Minoan priestess dress).
This has been a classic derail. I tend to assume they’re intentional on the part of men who want to shunt debate on women’s issues into a format where it’s mainly semantics wankery and nothing substantive is said at all. If the answer was “This is irrelevant and we’re not talking about it” the person asking could pat themselves on the back for victory over the people who’re too scared to stand up to his manly questions. He does get the award for derailing feminism, so there’s that as a consolation.
Noah – is this really what you wanted to be talking about here? It’s possible that this is a debate that’s fun for you, but from where I sit, it damages the point you were trying to make to get dragged into something that’s so tangential it’s practically in another hemisphere.
Well, I did talk about gender theory in the original post, so I feel it’s somewhat relevant. It didn’t go exactly where I wanted the discussion to go, but that does happen sometimes.
Charles is actually on the same page in terms of wanting more women in comics crit in general and in tcj in particular, I believe; he’s not arguing that that shouldn’t happen.
Oh, what the hell:
Noah: You would not, I don’t think, say, “we can tell that black people and white people are different from each other because white people don’t like porn with black people in it.” That would seem horribly reductive. It would also seem obviously wrong, for many of the same reasons that (as I pointed out) it’s wrong when talking about trans people. It also is a bad argument and insulting because there’s a long history of stigma and oppression which involves systematic devaluation of black people’s appearance, as well as systematic sexualization and fetishization.
Hee, you really think I wouldn’t try to make that argument work? As Jones demonstrates above, you’re not so good with analogies. If you’d come along and said to me, “black women are white women” — that is, took two members of the category WOMAN and erased the difference — then I might very well point out that racists can very clearly make the distinction as demonstrated by their differing approach to black women in situation X, Y or Z — that a crucial distinction does exist, that of skin color, if even racists are capable of regularly making it. Now, the difference between these two members doesn’t involve the removal of a sexual organ, so the sex analogy might not be the most ready to mind, I’ll grant. But it does demonstrate perfectly well the same thing I was demonstrating with the trans porn example — people are going to make the distinction, regardless of whether you want to pretend it doesn’t exist for utopian purposes. The distinction doesn’t make for devaluation of any sort, but that has to do with what people do with the distinction. I can acknowledge black skin and white skin as a difference without believing one is inferior, or without having to take into account the history of subjugation. Why? Because there’s an objective difference! Racism didn’t create the difference, racism rests on that difference. To say otherwise, would make nonsense of Fanon’s point about being a prisoner of his skin.
What’s going on here isn’t so different from literary interpretation where there’s multiple sources of “intention” or information, the individual categorizer, the object being categorized, the social tradition, and there’s probably more than that (maybe technological possibility). You, as an individual, can pretend all you want, but it doesn’t much change the rest of reality, such as when many feminists mention women, they’re not thinking of someone with a penis or who once had a penis, or biological men who really feel themselves to be women. (As I said, I’m cool with treating trans women as women and the social equals to all traditionally defined men and women; just don’t pull this white knight butt hurt stuff on me — Hiya Josh — because I don’t accept the proposed Newspeak solution.) Likewise, there are times when the social tradition is just plain wrong about the object being categorized, such as when a whale was once popularly called a fish, or maybe Pluto was once a planet. You might succeed in eventually getting everyone to call whales ‘fish’, once again, but that doesn’t reduce the difference between the whale and the salmon that exist between the objects being categorized. It might, however, alter how people treat whales. Again, the social treatment (and its history) is a separate issue here, but we’re not going to agree on that, since I prefer arguments leading my ideology, not vice versa. To wit:
It [the rebel flag] was a — or rather, the — symbol of a culture which fought a treasonous war on behalf of slavery. I don’t see how that can be erased from what the symbol means.
You’re a radical essentialist when it comes to the rebel flag, but the category WOMAN can accommodate anything you want it to. All differences in objects just exist in our heads, changing as we want them to change, but not the arbitrary meaning of flags. The rebel flag is where the object finally takes its stand?
” the difference between these two members doesn’t involve the removal of a sexual organ,”
It doesn’t for trans people either. This is what I’m saying when I suggest you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, and therefore your claims to be engaging with difference are suspect.
You’re not reading my comment about the rebel flag very closely. The part you didn’t quote said the meaning could change.
Oh, and yeah, more good female writers equals more good. And bad female writers should have just as much of a chance as bad male writers. That, too, is a good, just not for writing.
This doesn’t mean that everywhere there’s a disproportionate breakdown in the male/female ratio there is a problem in need of a solution. However, the asymmetry should always be open for investigation to see if it’s a problem (we shouldn’t start off “blind”).
Haha, I almost put in a disclaimer about that very thing, Noah, but chose not to. It just doesn’t matter that much. You have a phallus and then you don’t. Shit on walls.
Well, I agree with that. That’s what I’m saying in the piece; you need to be willing to see a difference in order to take steps to try to fix it.
I think it’s also the case along with that that what’s good or worthwhile tends to be a judgment that isn’t made in isolation from gender. If thoughtful representation of women is seen as an important component of good art, for example, Crumb looks a lot less impressive than if your main criteria is drawing ability.
And here’s the whole post of yours:
“The flag use to be a symbol of culture.”
It was a — or rather, the — symbol of a culture which fought a treasonous war on behalf of slavery. I don’t see how that can be erased from what the symbol means.
– See more at: https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/05/how-country-music-got-more-racist/#comment-79816”
That’s it. Also, we previously went rounds on the meaning of the rebel flag … and it wasn’t me who was arguing that its meaning hasn’t changed.
If you want to talk about the flag, you should do it on that thread, if you would.
Nah, it was just to make the point about how you adjust your position according to your ideological wish. I don’t want to re-argue the flag question.
I really am going to bow out now.
My position is the same in each case. That position being that discussions of difference are important, but require an actual engagement with the history and circumstances being discussed if they are going to be worthwhile.
Fixation on penises. Bringing up sex work and porn. Yeaaaaah. You can cloak yourself in whatever guise of “honest discussion” you want to Reece. But I see you. There’s not a damn thing honest about what you’re doing, or have done here. Maybe you need to examine why defining transwomen as not women is so important to you. And why in a conversation about women’s voices in comics, you felt that was the main thing you wanted to bring to the discussion.
Oh and I agree with Josh. If you really wanted to have this conversation for legit, Charles, you could go start it with any number of trans-academics on the matter. That you have hidden the conversation here, shows two things: that you don’t REALLY want to have the conversation, and 2) that you’re just using it to derail from the issues of Heidi’s article, and the content of what Noah said in his article.
Noah- I think you fail to establish how and why a failure to hire a female critic results in a failure to adequately cover art comics. You make an argument from authority – well, people in the academy talk about gender a lot, so you should take your cues from them- but it that just isn’t specific enough. Even more essentially, you ascribe a motive to TCJ that I don’t believe its ever claimed. Is their charge to cover Art Comics? & even if it is, they may well believe that they are doing so just fine as it stands. After all, you acknowledge that females may have a distinct take.I presume the same would hold true for males. What if the editors have read submissions by females that could be described as having a distinctly female quality & were not convinced, or simply disagreed? Or are you suggesting that they have an obligation to publish women even if they otherwise would not, i.e, because a female wrote this, we can’t apply our authentic critique?
It’s not a just approach. If we’re willing to accept distinctions on one end, we must be consistent with that principle throughout.
Whoa. Sorry for all the typos.
Again, re Groth; You make a huge leap by extrapolating a “no difference” ethos from a refusal to regard sex as a determining factor in assessing a work.After all, you could detect a distinctly feminine quality and dislike the work.
Hey Luke.
Tcj has long had as its battle cry, “comics are art.” I don’t think that I’m ascribing that motive to them.
It’s not just the academy who feels that having an intelligent take on gender matters to good art. As I said, that’s a popular take too. Thus Heidi’s comments.
I’d agree that you could dislike femininity. That would be misogyny, which I believe is one of the central evils in human experience. I very much doubt that Groth would admit to it, or take a stand on those grounds. The fact that I’m assuming he would not is in no small part a function of my respect for him and his good intentions.
Luke P: If your definition of “adequately cover art comics.” means you can have a nearly all male staff, and ignore feminism and women’s issues in general, you’ve defined “art comics.” as something that’s really only going to appeal to men, talk about things men find interesting, and by its nature excludes women.
If that’s a compelling art form for you, that’s fine, but it’s not for me, and I assume it’s not for Noah. It’s not just that women have a distinctive take, it’s that women are literally (roughly) half of humanity. I’d say they have an obligation to publish women as much as they have an obligation to ever expect to publish academics. After all, the *male* academic experience is far smaller than the entirety of the female gender. Some people are bored by academics. Not to mention the fact that by excluding women (intentionally or not) they limit readership to mostly men as well.
If you don’t see how that’s stupid, I don’t know if you’re up to being helped out in your understanding. Unlike Noah, I make one presumption of good intentions, and then assume otherwise.
“Tcj has long had as its battle cry, “comics are art.” I don’t think that I’m ascribing that motive to them.”
You’re shifting goalposts here, from a journalistic function ( i.e, “covering art-comics”), in which editorial decisions must be made, to the promotion of mere sentiment, in which case finding a female who agrees that “comics are art” & hiring her for it would solve the problem. You know that’s not what you’re demanding TCJ do.
“It’s not just the academy who feels that having an intelligent take on gender matters to good art. As I said, that’s a popular take too. Thus Heidi’s comments.”
— Did Heidi suggest TCJ needed to cover “gender matters”, or did she suggest TCJ not paying a female for content was the problem? Either way, does this make whichever claim she or you are making “popular”? If it is “popular”, what does that tell us? CSI & Miley Cyrus are “popular” too.
“I’d agree that you could dislike femininity. That would be misogyny, which I believe is one of the central evils in human experience. I very much doubt that Groth would admit to it, or take a stand on those grounds. The fact that I’m assuming he would not is in no small part a function of my respect for him and his good intentions.”
I don’t believe you believe this statement reflects what I wrote.It’s hard to imagine you weren’t blushing while you did so.
An editor could receive one hundred submissions that are all equally feminine but dislike all of them not because they are feminine.
We are no more required to appreciate femininity-qua-femininity than we are masculinity, after all, & unless we are willing to reduce femininity to a single kind of expression, we are forced to admit that the simple presence of a feminine voice would not necessarily promote the ideology of “inclusion” or “diversity” that you seek to enforce. This was R. Fiore’s point, I believe. He was pointing out that TCJ could get a female writer who’s anti-feminist, or otherwise does not trumpet the ideology that it is your real aim to promote.
Josh—
“If your definition of “adequately cover art comics.” means you can have a nearly all male staff, and ignore feminism and women’s issues in general, you’ve defined “art comics.” as something that’s really only going to appeal to men, talk about things men find interesting, and by its nature excludes women.”
But if this were true, “art comics” wouldn’t appeal to women & there would be no women seeking entry into TCJ . This is apparently not the case.If it were, there would be no women who want to write for TCJ.If there are no women who want to write for TCJ, there’s no case to be made for hiring them.
“If that’s a compelling art form for you, that’s fine, but it’s not for me, and I assume it’s not for Noah. It’s not just that women have a distinctive take, it’s that women are literally (roughly) half of humanity. I’d say they have an obligation to publish women as much as they have an obligation to ever expect to publish academics. After all, the *male* academic experience is far smaller than the entirety of the female gender. Some people are bored by academics. Not to mention the fact that by excluding women (intentionally or not) they limit readership to mostly men as well.”
No one is stopping women from writing criticism or creating comics.
“If you don’t see how that’s stupid, I don’t know if you’re up to being helped out in your understanding. Unlike Noah, I make one presumption of good intentions, and then assume otherwise”
Oh, help me, wise one.
I doubt this conversation is going to really go anywhere useful. However, yes, I think when you talk about rejecting femininity because it’s femininity, that that is in fact misogyny. I don’t think that’s where Gary’s coming from. I think your effort to defend him on those grounds is far more insulting to him than anything I said in the article.
Also, I don’t know why you’re assuming I want women included who espouse any particular ideology. I didn’t say anything of the kind.
Noah, I never wrote that femininity should be rejected for femininity.You know this, but it’s all you can use to try and shut this down, so you’re sticking with it.This is pure invention on your part.If you’d respond to the very clear arguments I made, maybe this would go somewhere.That you’re refusing to do so suggests you suspect it might go somewhere you’d rather it didn’t; you might have to acknowledge the fallacious nature of your claims.
Bye, Luke.
If you believe this is non-ideological, Noah, & just a matter of hiring a person with the right kind of parts ( as though that’s not ideological), then the hiring of a female who expressed in her essentially female way – as you suggest all females MUST – that really, males are better writers and should be privileged over females, would be a victory.It would meet the requirements you’ve laid out.
But, if you believe that is ok- a win, even- then you couldn’t rationally make the case that there’d be anything wrong with a male following that advice.
This is about hiring the right kind of female .
No, it’s not.
I don’t suggest anything of the kind you’re claiming. Insisting I do with more and more hysteria doesn’t make you look any more reasonable or convincing.
And I’ve done this go round with you over and over in the past, Luke, and it never goes anywhere good. Please don’t post here again.
Well, I think that even among people with nearly identical ideologies, coming from different backgrounds can lead to some subtle differences in perspective. For example, I read that Clarence Thomas, uniquely among Supreme Court justices, has an intense loathing for Ivy League schools because of the perception that he got into Yale through affirmative action. So even though he and Scalia always vote the same way, their racial differences might lead to a wider range of perspectives if they were both making art or writing criticism. I apologize in advance if this is the stupidest fucking post anyone has ever read, but it seemed somewhat relevant to Luke’s point.
I don’t think it’s stupid, Jack. It’s a good point.