I’m a freelance writer who occasionally writes about comics. I’m sort of an outsider to comics criticism and reporting; I came to it two years ago when I wrote a long piece on truth in autobiographical comics for The Awl.
Recently , Pacific Standard ran an interview I did with Hillary Chute, a comics scholar. On Twitter, I couldn’t help but notice when Tom Spurgeon mentioned it:
i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born
writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too
I’d like to explain how I interpreted his words about my work, pausing first to acknowledge the obvious fact that there’s something distasteful about parsing someone’s subtweets (at least in public). It feels undignified. I’m doing it anyway because it’s a near-perfect case study in how comics criticism is systemically closed to women.
Here’s a gloss of what Spurgeon’s subtweets said to me:
- Why did I write about THIS woman in an academic milieu? I should have written about THAT one…even though she retired like five years ago.
- Tom Spurgeon knows who the real foremost comics scholar is. His ruling on the matter is final and implicitly correct. It is impossible for another writer to have a valid, but different, opinion.
- Further, he feels the onus upon him to dispense writing advice to his brethren. “Writers, please…” Everyone gather round so Tom can tell you how to be.
- But he disguises his presumption with faux humility: he “can do better, too.” Better, in this case, meaning two pompous subtweets.
- He questions my journalistic integrity, saying I “shape the past” to serve an agenda. A nasty little thing to say about a professional writer, even in a subtweet.
- That agenda, according to Spurgeon, was “to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article.” Note the negative value judgment here on distillation, reads well, and modern. Are those things bad?
In summary, he suggested there is only one female comics scholar(-ish person) worth writing about, questioned my integrity, and used my work as an example of what comics critics must never do. And he got to do ALL OF THAT without ever saying my name or directly referencing the piece. I mean, why would he? To him, it wasn’t even real for the simple reason that he disagreed with it.
All critics should try to seek out opinions that are different than their own, but with vaunted experts like Spurgeon, the stakes are even higher. As one of the foremost figures in comics writing, he has a professional responsibility to think twice before trashing new perspectives and alternative approaches to his field. He seems like a vocal advocate for diversity, but how does he expect his insular world to open up if he isn’t willing to entertain the possibility that someone who doesn’t share his view isn’t just a hack?
I’m lucky to be old enough and confident enough in my talent that Tom Spurgeon’s opinion doesn’t impact my sense of self-worth. But I suspect his lack of regard might have been deeply discouraging to a younger woman, especially one who hoped to seriously pursue writing about comics. When I think about that, and about how he broadcast his ridiculous proclamations on what a critic should be to his 14k followers—who, again, give his opinion on these matters special weight—I feel mad as hell and perversely amused. I have read the same tone in other women’s comments when they write about sexism in comics.
Which brings me to another tweet of Spurgeon’s I saw earlier in the week.
dear professional friends that happen to be women — please stop writing me and start posting
He wasn’t talking to me, of course, and I know he meant well, but boy, did that stick in my craw. This sort of “encouragement” has seemed to me a common refrain from male critics as the conversation about The Comic Journal’s woman problem has revived itself over the last few weeks. Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.
I strongly believe that Spurgeon and Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler at TCJ (and many other guys) really would love to see more criticism from women writers. But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.
It is perhaps worth noting that my Chute piece criticized The Comics Journal for having a homepage where every single piece was authored by a man. This is nothing that people in the comics community don’t already know. I received a (friendly, complimentary) message from TCJ explaining that one of the interviews on their homepage was actually written by a woman. When I pointed out that it hadn’t been there at the time I was writing, they said “No worries.” I had not apologized.
What kind of mindset does it take to read “yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago” (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously? (They also said they were working on it. How? Rethinking their commenting policy seem like a step in the right direction, but what else is in the works?) Dan and Tim strike me as likeable, smart, thoughtful people, but sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them, as Heidi MacDonald and Nicole Rudick (at Tom Spurgeon’s site) and many others have before me.
Why do women favor platforms that aren’t dedicated organs of comics criticism? Because those are the places they feel welcome. If TCJ wants more women to start writing for them, they need to apologize for their shameful lack of diversity on their Twitter and their blog and anywhere else where there’s the (admittedly off) chance that someone outside their circle of middle-aged male insiders might hear them. They should create a page on their website that outlines what they’re looking for in a pitch instead of burying the submissions email in a single line in their FAQs. The new submissions page, too, should include a prominent pledge to diversity. They should recruit graduate students or women that have been writing for free at other sites and offer those people choice reviews instead of letting them get claimed by the same five guys who always do them. (I don’t know the exact demographics of TCJ’s regular contributors, but I suspect they’d do well to keep an eye out for gay people and people of color, too.) Offer some of these new voices regular columns. Be proactive! I don’t even think it’d be that hard!
But to return to Spurgeon: subtweeting makes having a critical dialogue near impossible. I would have just replied or sent an email if I hadn’t felt uninvited to do so, but alas here we are. (Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch.) Given the closed-off milieu in which he works, if Spurgeon wishes to denigrate a woman’s piece in a public forum, I encourage him to do so in a more direct fashion. But I suggest he come correct instead of offering up his conflicting opinion as though its truth is self-evident like some Grand Poobah of Comics. Deep expertise has its advantages, but so do fresh eyes.
This is a story about my personal experience, but it isn’t really about me. I doubt anyone connected Spurgeon’s subtweets to me, and even if they did, no one cares—me least of all. But being aware of the conversation about women and comics criticism that’s ongoing, it was sort of fascinating to receive a critique in which I myself had been so thoroughly erased. My anger comes not from a place of sour grapes, but of imagining how that might feel to a woman who aspires to someday sit at the lunch table with Spurgeon and Gary Groth or smaller dragons like Sean T. Collins and Rob Clough. And by the way, as the community wonders how to encourage women writers, they’d do well to look to Clough, who has been, in my limited experience, a really kind and generous mentor. Please make him your king.
While I do not aspire to expertise, it is my fervent hope that some other woman will. (The dying relevance of TCJ is often overstated; I think it will persist in history in a way that the disparate pieces that people like me write for other markets simply cannot.) I’m sorry to say that I find the prospect very unlikely. Why would someone put herself through it? People in that world behave badly and they don’t even know it, and those are the good guys.
The world—in comics and around it—is changing, but then it always has been. I think life must be hard for men who appoint themselves the docents of something that never existed. I wish Spurgeon the best.
_____
Editor’s Note: Tom Spurgeon replies in comments below.
Tim Hodler of TCJ also replies in comments.
I think your sense of humor about this is really remarkable, and thank you for it– because I’m too pissed to laugh!
And you know what, those subtweets are really worth analyzing, so thank you for picking them apart. How condescending of Spurgeon.
You make great points here, especially about how blame of having a male-dominated comics culture gets shifted back onto female writers and creators. Grrragggghh.
Even with your excellent analysis, I can’t even begin to figure out what those tweets are meant to be saying. Chute and Shelton Caswell don’t particularly write in the same milieu, unless one ignores all nuances and genealogies in academic writing. They’re not in competition with each other in any sense – not even in a light-and-friendly sense. I read your interview; it’s terrific, and it doesn’t do anything to erase Shelton Caswell or prevent someone else from interviewing her. The interview doesn’t even much talk about comics history, really. What past is shaped, exactly?
I, too, have trouble reading Tweet, but I think what Tom was saying wasn’t that one female scholar should be covered instead of another, but that the interview set up Chute as the first such scholar in order to have an easy way of promoting her significance. I don’t see it myself, but I believe that was his point, not that anyone should only cover one female comics scholar approved by TCJ’s patriarchy or whatever.
The interview didn’t do that though, did it? I don’t really see how it can be read that way. And since the charge seems to come out of the blue, it ends up reading less as, “you said this one thing wrong,” and more as, “this project as a whole is flawed because you’re not talking about the right person.”
As Kim says, not linking to her piece or naming her comes across as contemptuous as well, even if that wasn’t the intention.
“I don’t see it myself,” but I believe that was his point. If so, his gripe was that it was like another one of though “comics aren’t just for kids” type intros, and not “this is the only woman worth talking about.”
I mean he did say, “i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute,” which works against that last interpretation.
‘though’ should be ‘those’
Hi, Kim. Thanks for writing this. I appreciate the perspective and I always like hearing criticism in the hopes that I can become better. Points taken.
I don’t suppose I can convince you that I wasn’t subtweeting you specifically but a thread I’d seen in a few things about Hillary Chute, but I swear that’s what I was thinking about when I made that tweet.
I would never suggest that you write about one person over another person, I just think that this type of presentation has the effect of excluding people in a way I don’t feel it’s necessary for them to be excluded. Lucy Caswell and Anne Rubenstein are really good writers that wrote in academia years ago, and I don’t want them to be forgotten. Ditto people like Heidi MacDonald and Cat Yronwode (for the Eisner work, specifically) in non-academic presses. (Incidentally, Lucy Caswell is still an active participant in comics, although she’s retired from her Billy Ireland position. I hope you’ll maybe consider her for a future profile.) I’ve felt similarly when people have engaged in that same way with newer writers about comics that aren’t white.
I do apologize for coming across as a patronizing ass in that please write publicly tweet — which was about a flood of e-mails I got from people, all of whom happened to be women, that were taken aback by a news story that day. I was hoping to add a note of public encouragement to some private encouragement I was sending out, including offers of a paid platform. I figured there were more people out there than those from whom I was hearing directly. In that case I think hearing from these specific people publicly would have been a boon. I don’t think they’re part of any problem, though. I think the problem is the problem.
I am in no way a grand poobah of anything, and I hope I never come across that way. My peers rag on me in private for equivocating more than I make strong statements, but I do occasionally present things in those kinds of terms, particularly tweeting. I’m certainly no grand poobah of writing about comics. My own writing is c+/b- material at its strongest, although I enjoy doing it very much.
It may be beyond my skill to not come across as someone making a summary proclamation in a tweet, but sometimes you read a bunch of articles and it inspires a tweet and sometimes you read a couple of tweets and it inspires an article. I will try to be more attentive to how that comes across in the future, and thank you for the reality check.
I’m interested that you brought in the TCJ representation argument into this thread because maybe this is a place I could come to for help on CR’s version of that matter. Is there something I can do better in that specific area when I employ so few writers? I do try to make sure I’m hiring women for what few gigs I have, and I do pay people when I hire them, but beyond that is there something I can do better?
Kim, thanks again. I’ll call attention to your piece here on my site, and if you ever want to write CR directly with criticism as to my writing I want you to know that’s also an option for you and I’d be happy to run something there.
Stuff appeared since I looked!
Charles has it right; that’s what I intended with the tweet. I liked the interview quite a bit; it was well done. I really admire Chute’s work. I just find that particular presentation of her problematic in that way and on balance unnecessary. In other words I think that presentation has a potentially unfortunate consequence in the same way Kim and some of you feel my tweets had unfortunate consequences.
Hey Tom. Thanks for coming by and responding so graciously.
“I just find that particular presentation of her problematic in that way and on balance unnecessary.”
Do you mean Kim’s presentation of Chute? Or the presentation of Chute in the thread you were tweeting about? Or both?
I mean the presentation of Chute as a pioneering academic, in Kim’s piece and in others pieces I’ve read and conversations I’ve had. If by “in the thread” you mean “thread of thinking” as opposed to a specific internet discussion, then the answer is “both,” or perhaps more properly “the second which includes Kim’s.”
Okay; thanks for clarifying.
I have trouble seeing that in Kim’s piece personally; she’s certainly saying that Chute’s work is important, but it doesn’t come across to me as saying there weren’t important comics scholars before her.
huh. well, if that idea isn’t in there then this was simply an article I read that same day and didn’t contribute to that tweet at all and we can all go home; i do remember liking the piece, though
Kim —
I’m surprised to see you quoting from our private correspondence without seeking permission, and even more surprised that you misrepresented it.
On the spur of the moment, I wrote you a brief courteous message complimenting you and noting a small error I thought you might be interested in correcting. (I appreciate notes like that from readers myself.) When you explained the situation, I said the equivalent of “no biggie.” This seems to have been a mistake.
I’m not sure why, though — was I supposed to get mad?
Here’s what I sent you via direct message on Twitter:
“Just wanted to let you know Annie Murphy did our Rick Geary interview on the front page. (Agree w/ yr larger point, which we’re working on.)”
And then I told you I liked your piece. I didn’t expect or in any way indicate that I expected an apology.
You then explained that the Murphy story wasn’t up when you wrote the piece, and I replied, “No worries. And you’re welcome!” (You’d thanked me for the compliment, which I think is fair to mention at this point…)
And that was it —that’s the sum total of our exchange. I wrote “no worries” not because I thought you’d apologized (why would I have thought that?) but because I’d told you about your mistake, and at that point it was up to you what you’d do about it; I wasn’t worried about it (hence “no worries”). You seem to have added “as of this writing” to your piece–I think that’s a fine and appropriate correction. (Incidentally Sarah Glidden was also on the main page that day (and on the day you wrote the piece), as one of two contributors discussing Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, but I didn’t think it was worth making into an issue in light of your larger argument, which again, I concede!)
With all this in mind, it’s a bit of a shock to read your interpretation of my reaction:
“What kind of mindset does it take to read ‘yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago’ (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously?”
I didn’t think you’d made an apology, never thought we deserved one, and didn’t expect one. And I am not sure what kind of mindset it takes to read “no worries” that way. It’s probably wiser to attribute this to miscommunication than to malice, so that’s what I’ll do.
The reason I said that I “agree w/ your larger point, which we’re working on” in my first message to you is that I do agree with your larger point. I can’t understand how you would interpret my message to mean anything other than what I plainly said: You made a very small mistake in your piece, which I liked overall. But it’s no big deal.
I didn’t go on and on about the ways I agreed with you (as you now claim I should have), because 1) this was a very brief exchange on Twitter direct message, with messages no longer than 140 characters or less, and 2) it would have been a bit rude for me to go on uninvited, wouldn’t it? If you were genuinely interested, it would have been easy to ask. You may be able to read minds, but I can’t.
I agree with you that it is a good idea to shift focus from “what people SAY to analyzing what they DO”—accurately reporting these issues is important. And while I also agree with your larger point about the need for more female representation on our site, I think it is worth noting all of the women whose contributions to TCJ.com you here ignore.
First, Kristy Valenti is the site’s editorial coordinator. She works tremendously hard, with little in the way of acknowledgment or thanks. In articles like yours, her contributions are always dismissed or ignored entirely, for reasons I can’t fathom (maybe because they’re never offered).
Second, here is an incomplete list of women writers (besides Kristy) who we have published in the last eight months or so: Shaenon Garrity, Nicole Rudick, Naomi Fry, Sarah Boxer, Whit Taylor, Annie Murphy, Cynthia Rose (she wrote today’s lead story for us), Karen Peltier, Jocelyne Allen, Zainab Akhtar, and Katie Skelly. We would publish every single one of them on a regular basis if they were interested in or able to do so. It is easy to find talented and intelligent female comics critics, but it’s hard to find ones willing to write regularly for the low pay and recognition we can offer in return. But we haven’t stopped trying, and we are corresponding with several other potential female writers for the site.
Further, since Dan and I began editing the site, we have also published cartoonists’ diaries (which I consider contributions to the site just as important as the prose pieces) from female artists including Tessa Brunton, Danica Novgorodoff, Faith Erin Hicks, Lucy Knisley, Gabrielle Gamboa, MariNaomi, Sara Varon, Emily Flake, Leslie Stein, Joyce Farmer, and Vanessa Davis. That’s almost exactly half of the cartoonists we have published in that feature.
On top of that, I would venture to say that we regularly and reliably cover a wider range of female-created work than any other comics site on the internet. It is very important to me on a personal level that women artists receive fair treatment and coverage. I have seen firsthand how female artists are subtly denigrated (and their contributions ignored or erased).
Does this mean we can’t do better at TCJ.com? Of course it doesn’t. We have a long way to go. I have said so publicly before. I don’t expect anyone to stop criticizing us as long as women writers are underrepresented on the site. Or to stop criticizing us regarding any of the other areas in which we could improve, of which there are many. Not only do I not expect people to criticize us, I welcome it — it’s the only way we can improve. Just please be honest when doing so, and please don’t misrepresent my private words in public.
As to your argument with Tom Spurgeon, I’ll leave it to the two of you. No worries on my end. (That doesn’t mean I think you just apologized.)
“But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.”
*The Daniel Clowes Reader* includes writing by Pam Thurschwell, Kaya Oakes, Adele Melander-Dayton, and Anne Mallory. The book features some early’-90s zine excerpts by Gilmore Tamny (she provides a short introduction to them); it reprints (for the first time) a few cartoons by Ann Roy (done when she was student at Mills in the 1940s); and includes many interview excerpts by women. Anne Mallory is one of the book’s editors, and the editorial contributions of Kristy Valenti and Janice Lee were key.
Percentage-wise, the majority of the writing is male-authored (all of the introductions, annotations, and many essays are by me). But the gender breakdown of the contributors I solicited is around 50/50.
Oh, and if I could edit my comment, after I listed recent female TCJ.com contributors I would add that during that same time period, there have been around four male writers for every female writer on the site. I want to be the first to admit that is not a good ratio, and I don’t want the rest of my comment to obscure that point, which I absolutely concede.
Tim, do you happen know if there are trends among the reasons the women you list give for not writing more regularly? I’m sure the broad one is that they’re busy with other things, but are the “other things” other _comics_ things, or other things besides comics (whether personal or professional)? And do individual male writers write more regularly than individual female writers, or are there just more men overall?
(I guess I know there are more men overall. I should have said, “are the %s just an effect of there being more men overall.”)
Hi Tom! Thanks very much for your comment.
Do you really think that profiling one person is excluding other people? I find that to be a very puzzling and curious stance. Not every article can be, or should be, a comprehensive look at the history of a given subject. I think it would have been very odd to list Hillary’s predecessors (male or female) in that piece. I also think there is probably a distinction to be made between calling someone a “pioneer” and positioning them as the foremost figure in a field that has only just begun to coalesce.
I agree with you that history is important, and I certainly don’t mean to diminish the contributions of the people you mentioned. But my story wasn’t about the origins of comics scholarship. And I don’t think that, in not writing that story, it was somehow dishonoring or forgetting Lucy Caswell or anyone else.
For critics, the natural impulse is to pass judgment on someone else’s work, so I can see why you’d call me out for not approaching a subject in the same way you might have. But that’s an unhealthy critical stance in general and especially for comics writing right now. *Right now* maybe the best way to improve the landscape is to focus more on critiquing your own words, if that makes sense. It’s clear to me you’re out of touch with your own writing in more ways than one. Your work is of rare quality. C+ my ass.
Noah, maybe Tom S. was reacting to sentences like this, which don’t argue for Chute’s firstness but seem a little overblown, if not factually incorrect: “Chute has emerged as the foremost comics scholar of our time, as well as one of the few female voices in the world of pop criticism.”
Link that to other statements about comics studies as still a “a relatively new sub-discipline,” its purported lack of canonical figures, and how it had no real academic footing till “the last ten years,” and Tom’s inferences — at least as stated above — don’t seem all that far-fetched.
@Caro—Long time no hear! Hope you’re well. In most cases, it seems to be “other things besides comics”—day jobs, better compensated freelance opportunities, other interests, etc.
We have a handful of very prolific male writers on the site, for whom we are very grateful. If we could find a few women as willing to write so regularly, it would be wonderful. (In some cases, women writers who might make a good fit for our site already have their own outlets; for example, there are several writers on this site who we’d be happy to publish, though we wouldn’t want to poach. Also, a lot of female critics who are prolific seem to be primarily interested in commercial manga or superhero comics, which we tend not to focus on.) But to answer your other question, no, I don’t the %s are just an effect of there being more men overall — I’m sure that’s a factor, but the %s don’t look good regardless. If we need to try harder, we need to try harder. And I believe female representation is not just a moral issue but that the site would be qualitatively better with more women contributors, too.
Caro, that sounds like a job offer if I ever heard one!
“Do you really think that profiling one person is excluding other people?”
????
No, I think that’s profiling a person. I’m not sure I get the rest of this, I’m sorry, although if part of that is you think I’m a better writer than I think I am, thanks, that’s super-nice.
Ha, not me! I’m totally out of comics-world. I stop by SPX to say hi and that’s about it…mostly I’m fully and joyously inhabiting a “social justice art” world at the moment, but I also have a baby who gets all the extra time I have to offer. Thanks, though!
That’s sort of why I asked, though – to some extent, the way in which real-life and motherhood distract women disproportionately to men is cited as a cause for male-dominated %s in many contexts – even broad strokes like “academic” and “corporate leadership.” So it may not be surprising that you see similar things within comics journalism and scholarship.
I don’t mean to suggest that “diverse interests” is gendered, though. Just noticing a similarity.
(Also I should have said “parenthood” rather than motherhood. I really need to log in so I can edit.)
Ohhhh man. Tim Hodler, I’m not sure where to start. I guess first with an apology. You’re clearly pissed and I’m genuinely sorry for it. I honestly meant what I wrote as constructive criticism. I like TCJ.
Second, a clarification: there was no error in my piece. Here’s what I wrote in the article:
“As of this writing, The Comics Journal, the central repository for literary comics analysis on the Web, has more than 30 interviews, reviews, and columns on its homepage—all of which were written by men.”
That’s why I wrote “as of this writing”…because homepages change all the time. I wrote the piece more than a month before it was published, and added the line about TCJ maybe a week or so before it finally ran. Please note I did not add “as of this writing” after our exchange. It was always there.
I’m also sorry I didn’t seek permission for sharing your DM. It honestly didn’t occur to me that you’d care. I’m not quite seeing why you think I misrepresented our exchange, though. I thought it was pretty descriptive.
Anyway, I find your defensiveness here SUPER obnoxious and unwarranted and representative of why your site continues to have a woman problem. I’m not going to apologize for not listing every woman who’s ever written for your website. I am in fact one of them; I know they’re there on occasion, and so does everyone else. The fact that you invoke their names in conversations like this is honestly weird.
I was hesitant to write this piece because I know that picking apart tweets and DMs comes across as petty. My larger point is that it seems to me that even some of the people who most vocally support women writers end up doing things that end up contributing to whatever this toxic cloud that keeps hardcore comics crit so insular. It seems to me that part of the reason the problem persists is that it’s sort of invisible to you. In writing this, I was trying to make it more visible.
Tim, you certainly shouldn’t hold off asking contributors to this site to write for TCJ!
Caro, at least here, I don’t know that women are less likely to write regularly? I think it’s more just there are somewhat less women overall interested in writing for HU for various reasons which I tried to parse out here to some degree. I’ve had various regular women writers (you, VM, subdee, Erica Friedman) who have all sort of moved on to one degree or another (though Qiana and Kailyn are still here!) But that’s also happened with lots of guys (Tom Crippen, Jacob Canfield…just lots of folks.) People just aren’t going to build their careers around a for free dinky comics site, no matter what their gender, is more or less the takeaway, so you just have to keep asking new folks (and going back to poke the old folks too.)
Peter: I guess? It seems pretty low key to me — and I’m not even really an especial fan of Chute’s work, for what that’s worth.
“It’s probably wiser to attribute this to miscommunication than to malice”
Too true, especially if your response to 50 words in two tweets is to believe your integrity has been questioned and your work has been denigrated.
I’ll admit though, if Tom can do all that in fifty words, he’s a much better writer than he gives himself credit for.
It doesn’t take much space to question someone’s integrity. You just did it in the equivalent of a couple of tweets, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a reflection one way or another on your abilities as a writer.
Women have lots and lots of reasons to believe they’re not especially welcome in many sections of comics culture. If they feel unwelcome, it’s not because they’re paranoid. It’s because they’re paying attention.
I’m not questioning anyone’s integrity. I believe Ms. O’Connor believes every word she wrote. I don’t think anyone sits down and writes a 1,500 word response to a couple of vague social media posts unless she believes what she’s writing.
I also believe that it’s entirely possible for someone as thoughtful as Ms. O’Connor clearly is, to completely misread a couple of social media posts and completely overreact to it.
@Kim. I really don’t remember how you worded your complaint in the piece originally, and believe you when you say that “as of this writing” was in your piece initially. That doesn’t really change anything significant about our exchange in my opinion — I didn’t know when “as of this writing” was when I sent you the correction, and I accepted your explanation immediately by saying “no worries” as soon as you told me. It didn’t stick in my mind because I truly wasn’t worried about any of this. As I’ve now said multiple times, I think the criticism in your initial piece was largely fair. I wasn’t concerned about any of this until you decided to make what I thought was a private polite exchange into a public attack.
As for the rest, if it’s “honestly weird” to mention the women who have written for TCJ.com in a conversation you started about the lack of women writing for TCJ.com, then I don’t have many options, do I? Also, I’d like to note for the record here that you’ve continued to attack me in your response, while I haven’t characterized you negatively at all up to this point, unless asking you not to misrepresent my words counts as an insult.
So, since you’re trying to make the invisible visible, and are very interested in civil exchanges that don’t alienate others and dissuade them from joining conversation, please tell me: How was my saying “no worries” spreading a toxic cloud? And how could I have responded that wouldn’t have merited a public rebuke?
“no worries” is often used as a response to apologies (as if to say “don’t worry about it” or “no apology necessary.”) I use it all the time, though typically I harbor a grudge for several years thereafter.
I agree with Peter Sattler above that the description of Chute is a bit inaccurate and pumps up her reputation at the expense of the history of comics scholarship. I find Chute represented this way (as the voice of comics scholarship) elsewhere, and I’m not that enamored of her work either, so that is a bit annoying.
That said, the general points made by Kim in the article and comments seem pretty clear-headed and accurate.
I miss Caro’s comics commentary. Bring Caro back!
If I had a dime for every time I’d asked Caro to write for us again, I would have a lot of dimes.
@Tim Hodler, “Public attack.” “Continued to attack” you. Truly, that’s fascinating. I’m pretty sure you’re the one who, in your last comment, implied that I was a liar while *you yourself* misrepresented what happened. I calmly corrected you. And it looks like I’m going to have to keep on doing that.
How did I misrepresent your words? Because I gave them more thought that you did? Yeah, well, that’s the point.
The toxic cloud I mentioned before wasn’t in reference to you; it was in reference to hardcore comics crit in general. Here’s a newsflash, Tim: those “other things besides comics” you mentioned (when Caro asked you about why women don’t write for TCJ regularly)–day jobs, better compensated freelance opportunities, other interests etc–TCJ’s male writers have those, too. Women aren’t staying away from your site because they’re busy. They’re staying away because you’re doing something wrong.
I don’t think your saying “no worries” spreads a toxic cloud. I never said that, just like I never said most of the words you are putting in my mouth in these comments of yours. Do I think your DM was a huge deal? No. Do I think that TCJ suggesting a “correction” for something that wasn’t even a mistake is indicative of its problematic relationship with women? Yes. I really do.
But now that you mention it, these comments from you today are in fact toxic. Your defensiveness is obnoxious. Your tone is obnoxious. Listing a handful of women who have been associated with your site when someone asks you to think more seriously about the larger issue is obnoxious. I could go through your comments point for point, annotating all the ways in which the stuff you’re saying is weird and wrong-headed, but why would I? Pretty sure I already tried that and it doesn’t seem to be going so well.
So let me just repeat what I said before: sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them.
@Dean Milburn Guess I’m just another woman reading too much into something a man said. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Curious as to how comics crit is ‘systematically closed to women” as uou state, but Hillary Chute is (rightfully) one of the most respected voices on comics in america. Not sure how to make sense of this.
Thanks Eric. :) Noah does try hard, and someday I’ll get back to writing!
Austin, the same way America is systemically racist, but Barack Obama is president, right? I prefer the word systemic to systematic, though – I think maybe that’s a typo, Kim?
Actually, Kim used systemic! My apologies.
Ah yes, i misread that. My apologies as well. But i still think its a stretch!
Spurgeon had a small critics,, i guess i dont understand how thats making writing about comics closed to anyone, whether you agree with what he said or not. Isnt disagreeing with something making it relevant and part of the discussion? Wouldn’t ignoring it entirely be more dismissive? When you make intellectual statements about art, people often disagree.
I got into alt comics from reading a book written by andrea juno. I never see her mentioned anymore but dangerous drawings was pretty influential to a lot of people. Does brining up her importance mean that im dismissing kim’s article? Or is it important to state junos influence on a generation of cartoonists?
Austin, I don’t think it’s the disagreement that Kim’s saying is a problem. It’s the failure to point out who he’s disagreeing with that she’s saying can be exclusionary. Precisely because you’re not actually making your interlocutors part of the discussion if you’re not addressing them or acknowledging them.
Bringing up other writers doesn’t dismiss Kim’s work. She didn’t say it did.
There certainly are many women in comics and in comics criticism. Ladydrawers has done some quantifying, though, and it’s kind of remarkable how male even indie publishing can skew.
Posting something on a public website that wasn’t even in response to the article in question is exclusionary? I just think that heads into really questionable territory. ‘I think you were talking about me and since you didn’t alert me to that, i am excluded.’
An article was written about Chute. Spurgeon mentioned that there are women who were important to comics criticsm before Chute. I don’t see that as leading to ‘systemic exclusion.’ It just seems like someone who happens to have a point of view that is *barely* related to the article in question.
Kim says Spurgeons subtweets say to her ‘why did i write about this woman…i should have written about THAT one.’ I dont understand how his tweet says that in any way. He praises Chute in his tweet! Again, how does a slight difference of opinion (where spurgeon praises two women involved in comics crit) lead to systemic exclusion of women from comics criticsm? Im willing to believe that deep deep bias exists towards female writing on comics, but i dont see it in this example.
Hey Austin. Again, it’s not really about different points of view. It’s about who gets to be in the conversation.
“@Dean Milburn Guess I’m just another woman reading too much into something a man said. ¯\_(?)_/¯ ”
No, you’re Kim O’Connor reading too much into what Tom Spurgeon said. @#*!
You took the most uncharitable reading possible of Tom’s tweets and spun it into a jeremiad that’s the literary equivalent of using a rocket launcher to swat a gnat. A gnat that isn’t really there in the first place.
It’s a fine example of the type of half baked litcrit that places far too much emphasis on overwrought, overreaching interpretations of text, in a manner that attempts to remove all room for debate. Spurgeon’s authorial intent becomes less relevant that O’Connor’s reaction because, if nothing else, Spurgeon, good guy though he may be, is too caught up in the patriarchal hegemon, to see the invisible meaning behind his words. Anyone who disagrees is either overtly sexist, or too compromised by the patriarchy to see what’s really going on.
Not every word or action in a systemically sexist society is sexist.
I’m no more than a camp follower to “comics culture” or comics writing, but from my outsider point of view, it seems to me that the bar for getting any sort of non-superhero comics writing published must be pretty low. Noah has built his “free dinky comics site” into what must be one of the top 5 sites for academic/semi-academic writing on comics, and I get the impression he’d love to have more thoughtful work by authors of any sex/gender to publish.
I’m not really following the last paragraph there. I thought Kim’s piece was thoughtful and well written; that’s why I published it. As for the top 5 sites for semi academic writing on comics…not sure if that’s the case, but I think the point is probably there aren’t a ton of such sites out there.
Hey Noah, I agree the piece was thoughtful and well written (and mostly wrongheaded re: Spurgeon), and I’m glad you published it.
The point I was trying to make in my last paragraph (and it’s unclear, so apologies for that) was I think anyone who can write thoughtfully on non-superhero comics can find a prominent place in the conversation. That’s all I meant by “the bar is low”. O’Connor, an admitted “outsider” certainly found a place in the conversation.
Noah, how how how is she not in the conversation? Spurgeon linked to this article and made a lengthy post in this thread
Dean; aha! I didn’t follow that; thanks for explaining.
Dean and Austin…I think the point is not that women will actually be stopped from posting, but that certain ways of interacting may make cause them not to engage. That’s what Kim is arguing in the essay.
fwiw; I think semi-academic publications probably have less of an issue with this? The academy isn’t perfect or anything, but there are a lot of women academics, and as an institution it’s pretty aware of social justice issues (again, with limitations.)
Ok, that makes more sense, although spurgeons subtweets didnt cause her to not engage, it resulted in her starting this longer discussion.
I think it would have been more fitting to the situation to have published this article in 100+ tweets.
…or contacting Tom personally to have him clarify what he was talking about and have a meaningful conversation (which could have led to a more complete article in itself) instead of escalating the whole thing based on incomplete information.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that this article exists as it is sparking conversation about some important issues in our culture in general and comics specifically. I just don’t think Tom needed to take fire publicly to make that happen.
Austin,
One of the driving points of the article, whether you want to agree with it or not, is that comments like those makes female writers want to disengage, or discourages engagement in the first place. The premise is that there is a far greater percentage of good writing on comics by women than is published, especially by TCJ. Holder admits to this. While I suspect that a lot of factors go into this, and I respect that there’s room for intelligent disagreement as to the contributing circumstances and actors, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that by speaking up one undermines the argument that it’s hard to speak up. If that were the case, the civil rights movement, or any social justice movement, would be over within a few days of the first headline.
Speaking up doesn’t undermine speaking up, but speaking up against something like spurgeons benign subtweets does seem worth disagreeing with. i think this is an interesting discussion, but I can’t read an article that makes spurgeon’s tweets an example of ‘systemic sexism’ and not disagree. Again, i actually think that systemic sexism exists in comics, but just not in this example.
Hey Austin. Just want to add that it’s not as though my article went up the same day (or week, or month) as a glut of other pieces about Hillary Chute. And Tom’s tweets were within a few hours of its publication. I realize some people see me as Nancy Drew in a tin foil hat over here but good grief. There’s a connection.
Hi Caro and Kailyn! I really appreciate your comments.
Dean. My intention was to do the exact opposite of remove all room for debate.
Let me throw some adjectives you have used to describe me right back at you: uncharitable, half-baked, overwrought, overreaching, wrongheaded. I did not say every word or action in a systemically sexist society is sexist. I pointed to a handful of specific words in a particular milieu as examples of actions that reinforce an insular critical landscape. If you want to characterize that into a hysterical woman screaming “patriarchy” at the top of her lungs, which you have pretty consistently done in your comments here, that is obviously your prerogative. But let me ask you: which of us is closed to debate?
This post is hardly “the literary equivalent of using a rocket launcher to swat a gnat.” (Or, excuse me, an *imaginary gnat*.) This wasn’t even the biggest comics criticism story of yesterday.
Lots of war imagery in these comments, fellas. *adjusts tinfoil hat* Wonder what that’s all about? Can anyone help me crack this case??
The issue is not about the bar being low to get published. It’s about a unhealthy critical environment. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present for your consideration Exhibit A: this abysmal comment thread.
Kim –
Your READING of Spurgeon’s tweets is uncharitable and wrongheaded, thus your ARGUMENT based on that uncharitable reading is half-baked,overreaching and wrongheaded. I shouldn’t have used overwrought, I meant it in its meaning of overelaborate, but it’s too loaded a word to use. I’m sorry for using “overwrought” You seeing me characterising you as a “hysterical woman screaming ‘patriarchy'” is also uncharitable and overreaching, but to each her own.
Seems to me, given your standard for interpreting the remarks of others, your intentions around room for debate are entirely irrelevant. Despite numerous measured posts wondering how the hell you’re seeing what your seeing in Spurgeon’s tweets, and him dropping by to give an account of his intentions, all that really matters is your interpretation of his remarks. I don’t think there can be a more unhealthy critical environment than that.
It’s a style of argumentation that I believe is anti-debate because, because it doesn’t allow for the possibility you’re wrong about your interpretation of Tom’s remarks, because, anyone who can’t see that your interpretation is correct is either sexist, or well intentioned, but blinded to the impact of the patriarchy on the discourse.
I don’t think you’re crazy, just wrong.
Regular syzed mike, As Kim says in the piece, she didn’t feel comfortable contacting Tom.
Dean…I really don’t think Kim has said, or even implied, that anyone who disagrees with her is sexist. She did say, and imply, that your particular rhetorical approach might have problems.
Theres a connection what you wrote and what tom posted, sure. But im still unclear in how Tom praising Chute in his tweet translates into ‘why did I write about this woman and not that one.’
I also dont think this comment thread is abysmal. It’s an open read underneath the article where we are all publicly discussing what you wrote and asking dor clarification on some points and disagreeing with others.
Noah: I can understand that given her perception of the intent behind his tweets coupled with the atmosphere of the comics world as background.
But would “going public” over this apparent misunderstanding really be the less unsettling option? I guess I’m just trying to wrap my head around the issue here. From the outside I feel that it could have been resolved before it started (under ideal conditions anyway) and appears to be a non-issue that at first glance looked like another existing issue that definitely needs to be addressed.
I’m not trying to minimize Kim’s feelings in the matter but trying to better understand what’s at issue in this post-Tom’s Response world in which we now live.
Austin,
I think I misunderstood you… That is, I hadn’t realized you were speaking to the response to Tom. Instead, I took it to be a more general and connected to the first point about Chute. My apologies.
Noah, I didn’t say she said everyone who disagrees with her is sexist. She didn’t. I did say that she thinks that everyone who disagrees with her is either sexist OR they are “good guys” who “behave badly and don’t even know it”.
It’s not the only thing she’s said which indicates she really isn’t into open debate.
First, this
“For critics, the natural impulse is to pass judgment on someone else’s work, so I can see why you’d call me out for not approaching a subject in the same way you might have. But that’s an unhealthy critical stance in general and especially for comics writing right now. *Right now* maybe the best way to improve the landscape is to focus more on critiquing your own words, if that makes sense.
So, Tom, rather than doing what comes naturally to a critic, i.e. offer what he believes is relevant criticism, he should self censor and ask “What would Kim O’Connor do?”, because otherwise Tom will just spew a toxic cloud and create an unhealthy atmosphere.
I realize, given that Tom is the Illustrious Potentate of comics crit, he comes from a position of privilege and therefore, even though one of her big complaints is that Tom is telling her what to write about, it’s not at all hypocritical for her to do the same thing for him.
Next this :
“It’s about a unhealthy critical environment. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present for your consideration Exhibit A: this abysmal comment thread.”
She welcomes debate, but the resulting conversation, where, if there is debate, people will necessarily question and refute her article, is just another part of the problem.
Next this,
the way her argument takes a right turn toward the end is used to stifle the best refutation to her toxic environment theory. Despite the fact that the majority of her article is based on a very personal, idiosyncratic interpretation of Tom’s Tweets, she’s actually immune from the toxicity that Tom and others are spewing (purposefully or not), instead the victim is a hypothetical woman, who is younger, not as sure as herself and does not merely wish to dabble in comics, but to join the pantheon of Groth, Spurgeon and Hodler. It’s rhetorically clever, since the existence of her article makes a pretty good case as to how the tweets and the allegedly toxic environment doesn’t have any real world impact.
The fact that Kim can get published is then irrelevant, because the real harm is a toxic environment that systemically closes the field of comics criticism to some hypothetical woman who just doesn’t have the self confidence Kim has.
Finally, from her original article and many of here responses we get things like:
“Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch”
“Guess I’m just another woman reading too much into something a man said.”
“I realize some people see me as Nancy Drew in a tin foil hat over here but good grief.”
” If you want to characterize that into a hysterical woman screaming “patriarchy” at the top of her lungs,”
All of those comments are intended to quash debate. If you dare disagree with Kim O’Connor it’s because you’re sexist!
As for my approach, it is, what it is: a somewhat obnoxious response to what I perceive as stupidity. But it’s an equal opportunity approach. It’s Kim who decided that it wasn’t a Dean/Kim dispute, it was a Man/Woman dispute. To the extent it’s a lower case man/woman dispute, that’s an accident of biology. I can’t do anything about that.
What I can do is say that I had no idea that using weapon metaphors was part of the patriarchy. So sorry about that.
It seems to me that your comfortable level of self-confidence would have led you to contact him privately to see what was up, not feel uncomfortable about doing it. This essay where you’re raking him over the coals for an off the cuff remark just seems dumb and reveals more insecurities than you’d like to admit.
I agree that a discussion on increasing women’s comics article authorship is needed, but not this way.
Regular Syzed Mike, I would like to thank you for making me legit LOL at the end of your last comment. I, too, strive for understanding in this post-Tom’s Response world in which we all must live. Namaste.
I’m glad you’re pressing this question of why I wrote this in the first place. The “misunderstanding,” if you can really call it that (I would not), is the message. I suppose that if I had prioritized my own feelings, I would have never said anything at all. I knew that this would be unpleasant.
My purpose was never to comment on authorial intent. Even a half-baked literary critic would tell you that authorial intent is never the final word, even when you’re talking about a carefully crafted piece of art. (Consider, for instance, comics: the author creates meaning, but so does the reader.) But we’re not talking about carefully crafted pieces of art. We’re talking about a couple of tossed-off tweets and DMs. I never thought that Tom’s tweets or the messages from TCJ were especially thought through or that they came from a place of intentional malice. In fact, that was part of my point. I don’t think Tom’s intent should be disregarded, but I don’t think it should be over-emphasized, either.
With all due respect, I didn’t write this out of some burning need for Tom to clarify what he thinks about me or Hillary Chute or my piece. It’s beside the point. I don’t think those subtweets are, like, the burning engine of misogyny. But I do think they’re illustrative case studies in why the world of comics crit is so closed off.
Dean, if blowing up an imaginary gnat with a rocket launcher is not crazy, then I don’t know what is. I suggest you reread your “numerous measured posts.” Especially that last one!
Anyway, I didn’t tell Tom what to write about. I asked him to think more carefully when he writes about other critics’ work. He said he would, which is cool. He doesn’t have to agree with me. Believe it or not, I think the world is a better place when critics can respectfully disagree.
If you wrote that instead of vitriol you chose instead, I think nearly everyone would have agreed. That’s far more satisfying and clarifying.
Is it possible to think of the tweets as, I dunno, unfriendly without actually seeing them as misogynist? I know there are a lot of shades of misogyny in this context when people are unfriendly to female writers, but just for the sake of argument here, it’s the difference in:
“i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born
“writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too”
and
i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute. she’s this generation’s Lucy Shelton Caswell, who was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born! love to see an interview with Caswell sometime soon.
Something like that.
Not that I write like that – I’m grouchy and negative and elitist and I overpopulate my prose with “buts” and “puhleazes” too.
But just to sort of move the convo away from intent and toward toward what exactly it is about the tone of that tweet that set hackles ablaze. (Are hackles flammable?)
Because a 1500 word response dedicated to proving the questionable toxicity of 50 words worth of Tweet is the epitome of respectful disagreement.
“What I can do is say that I had no idea that using weapon metaphors was part of the patriarchy. So sorry about that.”
Kim’s pointing out that metaphors are gendered. She’s not wrong about that.
“instead of vitriol you chose instead”
Vitriol? Seriously? This is the same comics community that clasped Gary Groth to its bosom, right? She didn’t even call anyone “meretricious.” Sheesh.
Dean, I’m not sure what on earth length has to do with respect. It’s not an inverse relationship where the increase of one decreases the other.
The piece isn’t just about those tweets. She talks about a number of other issues. You know that’s the case, surely; you’re desire for rhetorical one-upmanship is getting the better of you here.
I think part of the issue is actually the subtweeting, maybe? That is, not saying what you’re talking about, or who you’re talking about. I think that can feel more respectful in certain cases; you don’t want to call folks out. But it can also up making it difficult to engage, especially for folks who aren’t in the know about all the tells as to who is which and what is happening where.
Bart Beaty talks about this in terms of comics relationship with art, where comics is material, but can’t (or often can’t) talk back, or be acknowledged as a speaker. That can be really frustrating for folks on the outside, who essentially aren’t even given the benefit of being directly insulted.
Noah,
Re: Gendered metaphors, honestly, I genuinely had no idea. It makes sense. I’m not sure it has any significant real world impact or meaning, but I considered it enough to dump a goalposts metaphor, that I assume would be just as male gendered.
Re: The relationship between length of response and disrespect. I just deleted a paragraph that was explaining what I was trying to get at, but since I said it the way I did, your point is valid and I withdraw the comment.
While Groth can be quite malicious, I tend to give him leeway because he tends to have more ammo than a few questionable tweets when taking down a man.
Caro, your rephrasing of the offending tweets only removes any hint of criticism. Surely we don’t need a public space in which all communication is made so anodyne.
There’s been some confusion over Spurgeon’s meaning. I would distill his statement to:
“I’ve been reading some unspecified literature lately that treats Hillary Chute as if she’s the first woman of note to write about comics in an academic milieu. What about Lucy Shelton Caswell? We don’t need to erase history in order to write it effectively.”
The justice of his assessment depends on what he’s been reading. Otherwise I don’t see anything about his statement that suggests a grand assumption of male privilege unless you think a man has no place criticizing writing about women.
And really, postmodernist commenters, of course authorial intent isn’t the last word on everything, but either Spurgeon was talking about a piece by Kim O’Connor or he wasn’t.
Noah, I agree that this kind of anonymous call-out is likely a well-intentioned error, but that’s nothing like the art world’s habit of treating comics as raw material for a Lichtenstein.
Spurgeon just isn’t naming the articles, he’s not treating them as if they had no deliberate, mindful creators. Quite the opposite when he says, ““writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too”.
Zan, I think the point is that certain people can be spoken to, but don’t really get to speak back. It’s not exactly similar, but there are parallels.
okay, i admit it, it was totally my intention that people not speak back
how did i do?
I want to be very careful here, so let me be very clear at the outset: I do not wish to argue that Tom is lying about his authorial intent or what triggered his tweets.
I don’t think that Tom decided he wanted to oppress me as a woman by subtweeting me. I think he read my piece, and it stirred within him proprietary feelings on the subject of the history of comics studies–which, in his eyes, was misrepresented and handled incorrectly. I think it registered less as an autonomous piece of writing and more as “wrong and modern,” a nebulous category that I’d wager includes lots of mainstream writing about youngish figures in the industry. The sexism charges stem largely from his Lucy Caswell comment, which I still find absurd, as well as his paternalistic tone. And then another, separate, claim is that his actions reinforced barriers to women writing about comics.
Look, many if not most of us here spend a lot of time on the Internet. We all know what it’s like when see a flurry of commentary on a given subject. From my reporting on my original piece about Hillary, I can tell you that my piece wasn’t really overlapping with others. Probably the only substantive thing on her that ran anywhere close to it was Dan Nadel’s interview, which was published more than a month before mine. The only things I can even speculate that Tom is connecting to my particular presentation of Chute are some reviews of Outside the Box that ran in the Spring.
This is off topic, but what’s ironic is that if there’s a thread running through anything, it’s actually from Dan’s interview to mine. I was deeply impressed that he kicked it off by questioning Hillary about her views on canon. But I was also appalled when he said that her canon was the same as the one in In the Studio, which featured literally no women.
Spurgeon can be a pretty frustratingly vague writer. When reading Comics Reporter, I find myself reading articles I have no idea what they’re supposed to be about. “He’s… chiding? Somebody? Over… some issue? And he’s recommending… something? as a… solution?” Without referring to people explicitly, you’re left with a vague sensation that some finger-wagging is going on, and that’s basically it.
But when you’re on the (apparent) receiving end of the chiding, as here, it must be even more frustrating. So I think O’Connors’ reaction here is perfectly natural.
Tom, when you do what Lars is talking about, and discuss somebody without mentioning their names or linking, how often do people talk back? That seems like a formula for not having people engage, even if you’re not doing it with that intention in mind.
Even if Kim’s interpretation of Tom’s tweets made sense (it doesn’t), equating those tweets to oppression, in a world with female circumcision, honor killings, legislative and religious assaults on reproductive rights and a persistent discriminatory wage gap, strips the word “oppression” of any real meaning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
I don’t think I’m that much more vauge than anyone else, although it’s a criticism I’ll keep in mind. Twitter is full of vague thoughts and generalities. So is a lot of on-line writing. Sometimes what’s clear to you isn’t clear to others. I thought it was pretty clear in the context of the moment what the “please write publicly” tweet was about for the people to whom it was aimed.
Laurenn McCubbin wrote a tweet yesterday about people that do “comics reporting” that I joke responded to, but I wasn’t frustrated by the vagueness of it. I see things all the time that could be criticisms of me, or what I do. Neither you or Lars are bringing up specific examples in this mini-exchange. Is this frustrating? Not really. I get your point and will keep the criticism in mind even with my snap reaction.
I think there are reply buttons on tweets. I think there are sites that will run responses, including my own, and that’s what happened in this case. I think much of the Internet exists as a platform to facilitate responses and people being heard. As for me, I run every letter I get. I ran a link to this article on my site in prominent fashion.
Look, sometimes very specific things set us off. At other times, general things may set us off. Sometimes that response is specific. Sometimes that response is more general. Somtimes it’s a tweet. Sometimes it’s a giant essay and avalanche of follow-up commentary.
I don’t know, Noah, I have to think there’s some element of humor in the idea a response was being frustrated in this specific case, at the end of this giant tidal wave of words. I’d hate to see how lengthy and how many sites would be brought into a non-frustrated response. And hey, maybe I’m wrong.
I think I’m done reading this just from a time management standpoint, so if there’s a response that any of you feel is necessary, please e-mail me. Kim, like I said, I appreciate the criticism and will keep it in mind, even as I disagree with the bulk of the multiple characterizations involved and I’m afraid I do wonder after some of your allowances as to my motivation given their certainty.
Sometimes a tweet is just about an idea one encounters while powering through a bunch of pieces. Or about a news story or thought of the moment. They can be dumb. Or not thought out. Or, one supposes, a startling a-ha moment into the writer’s soul and the culture in which we all exist. I usually think they’re not that. They can be about you in vague terms, or about you specifically, or may not be about you at all.
I think I’ve explained what those of mine in question were about in terms of my motivation and aim. But yeah, they can be argued to be something else entirely, and they certainly exist as distinct things removed from their intended consequence.
I appreciate the forum to make my opinion known.
I also hope to god this isn’t a recurring HU feature, because I tweet a lot.
Dean, saying, “somewhere someone has it worse” is really obnoxious. People always have it worse somewhere. Most folks on the thread agree that the lack of women writing comics crit in certain venues is a problem. I mean, why don’t you stop spending all your time complaining about folks complaining about things you think aren’t important, and instead go off and write about honor killings?
Seriously, this is an extremely obnoxious tactic. If you disagree, disagree, but don’t pretend you’re fighting a noble battle against female circumcision. That’s offensive and ridiculous.
Tom, I’m hoping Kim will write for us again, but I don’t suspect that Tom Spurgeon tweets will be a recurring feature.
In response to Zan: I don’t have any problems with your rephrasing! The point of the exercise was to play around with how it would have read differently if it had been written differently, so other ways of rewriting are just as valid as mine.
I personally removed the criticism on purpose, though, because I don’t see how criticism of Kim’s piece is necessary here, if the aim is to draw deserved attention to Caswell, as opposed to discouraging people from writing on Chute. (And let’s assume the former was Tom’s aim, per his comment.)
Writing that contains critical observation always gives off a sense of irritation – there’s not a whole lot you can do about that. But in Twitter especially where it can’t be fleshed out, it can be doubly off-putting because it just seems like a tossed-off dig. So there’s that context, as Noah points out.
So I’m struggling with the notion that it’s the “exclusion” in and of itself that’s the problematic thing about Tom’s tweets – although I say that with all respect for it being Kim’s actual experience, which is 100% valid. In my experience people within the comics community, even prominent people whom I’m sure get talked at non-stop, do talk to each other and are very accessible to each other. It’s partly because it’s a small community, and it’s partly because people do actually really like to talk about comics.
That said, those conversations are often very harsh and they do require some energy and extension of good will to get past the snarling, and that is problematic in and of itself, certainly. But there is definitely a genuine willingness to engage in comics – it just requires wrestling for the terms of the engagement more than in some other contexts.
And that’s what would have irritated ME if I’d been on the receiving end of those tweets or something like them: that requirement that I defend my starting premises every single time I speak. It is the most common rhetorical gambit in this community: your argument is invalid because your starting premises aren’t things that I think are important. And THAT is exclusionary. It’s like requiring people to have a password.
In this case, Kim’s choice to be “modern” (that’s probably not the word I’d have used but I am totally embracing it!) is set against the privileging of historical approaches in way that creates a false opposition between the past and the present. It suggests that a writer’s choice to NOT be interested in what amounts to “historical preservation”, is something inherently detrimental. It’s fine to remark upon it, of course, and to draw distinctions between the conclusions arrived at by a “modern” versus a “historical” approach. And certainly if a writer is actively historically ignorant, then correction is warranted. But there are shades of that privileging of history even in Tom’s more fleshed out response here.
And yes, it IS a “criticism” of Kim’s interview to observe that the introduction is not a history of academic writing in comics, and that a naive reader could leave with the impression that academic work on comics 20 years ago was an even vaster wasteland that it actually was. That is a valid criticism.
But the question I have is this: Why was it Kim’s responsibility to make that point in her article, rather than (e.g.) Tom’s, to make it in response to her?
It seems to me tweeting “all y’all who love Hilary Chute, remember Lucy Caswell” would be a perfectly valid dialogue to engage in following Kim’s essay. But “writers, puhleaze”? Not so much.
So what if Tom’s Chute subtweetery wasn’t specifically about Kim (which I thought was what Tom said in his initial response)? I agree that information is affected by the reader’s perception as much as the author’s intent but the bridge between the two is often context.
Context, I think, is also a big problem for anyone trying to do/say anything serious on Twitter. Caro illustrated that with her re-wording of Tom’s initial tweet above in that her more eloquent, less offensive version was 77 characters too long. It’s just too hard for the verbose to say anything meaningful in such a limited space beyond “here’s a link to where I used a lot more words”. That’s something that both the Tweeters and the Tweetees need to keep in mind when approaching that forum.
Tom definitely could have clarified his comments so that the we knew the context outright. But then again, ambiguity on social media isn’t an invitation to devise our own context and summarily criticize the motivations of the Tweeter.
Regarding the “gendered” language of combat metaphors: the first thing most people think of when perceiving an attack ends up being those kinds of metaphors. Is there a list somewhere of less violent conflict-related terms we should be using instead?
Also, I’m glad I made you feel legit, Kim! ;)
Noah, you missed my point entirely. The point is not that people have it worse somewhere else, we’ve got the time and resources to argue on the internet, of course there are people who have it worse elsewhere.
It’s the watering down of the word oppression I take offense to.
Regular Syzed Mike, I think it took Tom two tweets too! (But I didn’t count…)
“saying, ‘somewhere someone has it worse’ is really obnoxious. People always have it worse somewhere.”
There’s a difference (an important one, I’d suggest) between dismissing some current example of purported oppression with an “at least it’s not the gulags” vs. “there’s no oppression here.” The former is accepting the fact of oppression while dismissing it, whereas the latter is disputing its existence. Since there was no oppression in Tom’s tweets, it’s perfectly reasonable to cite real acts of oppression to demonstrate why that’s so for people who rhetorically insist otherwise.
Dean, I think I explicitly stated that I don’t see Tom’s tweets as oppression at the top of the comment. I said they reinforced barriers to women writing about comics. Some pretty nuanced points of my argument have gotten conflated and inflated in various parts of this comment thread, often by you. I have spent a lot of time trying to delineate my position here.
Tom’s right about the subtleties of Twitter, but my driving point is this: There are reply buttons on tweets. Subtweets make people less likely to use them.
“it’s perfectly reasonable to cite real acts of oppression to demonstrate why that’s so for people who rhetorically insist otherwise.”
Nope. It’s not. Kim never suggested she was suffering something equivalent to female circumcision. She said this was about women in comics criticism. Engage with that. Don’t pretend that you give a shit about all these oppressions that, in this context, don’t matter to you except as a rhetorical bludgeon.
Kim –
This is the sentence that gave rise to my comment
“I don’t think that Tom decided he wanted to oppress me as a woman by subtweeting me.”
It seems to me, and if this isn’t the case, I’ll take your word for it (even though authorial intent isn’t the most important thing here), the implication of that sentence is that you think Tom did oppress you as a woman even though he didn’t decide to do so.
Noah, had she said “I don’t think that Tom decided he wanted to offend me as a woman by subtweeting me.”
Even if we were to accept Kim’s argument, whatever its alleged nuances may be, what she experienced does not amount to oppression if “oppression” is used in any meaningful way.
You do a great violence to my point, Noah. No one suggested that anyone here was claiming that reading Tom’s tweets were equivalent to female circumcision. Some have argued, however, that they aren’t oppressive. If you don’t believe they’re oppressive, we agree.
Oh my God, people. We’re at more than a half dozen comments now arguing essentially about whether “oppression” is a valid synonym for “discrimination.”
There was no “discrimination” in Tom’s tweets, either … at least, discrimination qua oppression. There is the sort of discrimination involved in using one’s critical faculty: Tom likes this, but not that; Kim likes that, but not this.
I agree with Noah. The whole “worse things are happening elsewhere so stop complaining” move is a great derailing tactic. I usually get it when I’m discussing things like prison reform or foreign policy and conservative types try to shut it down with “at least you live in a country where you’re allowed to say that”…like that should be good enough for everyone.
I see it a lot in gender disparity conversations like this, too. I think it should be considered a concession speech regardless of their opposition’s merit.
The point of the OP and much of the comments thread, however, is that there was discrimination, because of the ways in which Tom’s tweets, consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or not, participated in the systemic marginalizing and/or silencing of women’s voices.
Yes, but the point isn’t valid. Tom’s tweets actually praise not one, but two woman scholars.
It’s all moot, anyway. Serious academic study of comics has been going on for more than half a century in French and Italian universities. But everyone participating in this discussion is, as usual, americanocentric, so Caswell and Chute appear to be trailblazers. Whatever the excellence of their work, they’re hardly that.
“Systemic marginalization” is close enough to “oppression,” isn’t it? The former is a member of the latter. Whether tweeting in response published articles oppresses another, such as the author of one of those articles, when she or anyone else can write an(other) article or another tweet or an email in response is what’s being argued about, I believe …. However you want to frame it, it just doesn’t seem very marginalizing or oppressive or shaded by misogyny (cf. very real examples of such things). ‘Disagreement’ seems the more appropriate term, but that’s kind of boring, I guess.
Alex, how in the world does the fact that Tom praised two (different) women writing in (the different milieu of) academia (which is pretty much completely different from comics journalism/commentary, although Chute may be one of the most overlapping figures) have anything to do with whether the tweets participated in the marginalization of voices in the context Kim was working in? I’m sure Chute appreciates Tom’s praise, but I also doubt it has much impact on whether she feels empowered to speak or not. A perhaps comparable situation would be if Critical Inquiry had tweeted in response to her book proposal saying she should be writing about Charles Dickens instead of R. Crumb. But that didn’t happen.
Academia has been working to empower women’s voices for awhile now, and they’re not fully successful but they’re quite far along. And one of the ways they accomplished that joyful feat is by no longer responding to women who protest systemic marginalization by saying that their points aren’t valid.
That said, the point you raise hardly makes the conversation moot. A factual error caused by a limited perspective, while quite interesting, has nothing to do with climate, which is, again, the point of the OP and most of the subsequent comments.
Charles, I can see where you’re coming from. But I think it collapses too many degrees of things. I am personally not comfortable saying that Tom’s tweets were oppressive. But I am comfortable with saying that they participate in a climate that has the effect of marginalizing women who want to participate in this conversation.
I think the reason I’m not comfortable with “oppression” is that I don’t think gender is the explicit target here, and oppression has connotations to me of intent. I don’t think that, overall, the milieu of comics (at least not indie and art comics) intends even to marginalize women, let alone oppress them. I DO think that the climate is restricted and proscriptive in ways that have a marginalizing effect. It’s also a selective effect: women (really, people period) in the limited American indie context are more similar to each other in terms of interest and voice than in some of the other milieus I’m privileged to spend time in.
So to me it’s worth making that distinction, because I think that more awareness of those systemic characteristics would go a long way toward making the climate more friendly. It’s probably my belief in the ultimately good intentions of most people in comics toward diversity that makes me feel that way. The more openness and diversity of thought there is, though, the more diversity of bodies there will be.
“Oppressed” and “discriminated against” are not words I wish to use to describe how I feel, though I wouldn’t begrudge someone else’s right to use them in this conversation. I agree with Noah’s and Caro’s and Regular Syzed Mike’s comments. It’s semantics.
In my comment that Dean keeps referring to, I said (or tried to say) that I didn’t feel oppressed. I went on to parse my charges against Tom: I saw sexism HERE and HERE and systemic exclusion HERE. I think the sexism and the exclusion were unintentional, but symptomatic of a larger problem within a particular milieu.
Haven’t had a chance to read all of these comments yet but will catch up tonight.
Hi Kim,
Thank you for the clarification re: whether or not you feel oppressed by Tom’s comments. And, given I misunderstood you, I apologize for accusing you of dumbing down the word “oppression”.
A quick question when you get a minute. You do not feel oppressed by Tom’s words, but I assume by “I wouldn’t begrudge…” means that you believed someone could validly feel oppressed by them. My question is, do you consider the words themselves to be oppressive generally? You’ve made it clear that Tom’s words don’t really have an impact on you, and your level of access/participation in the comics crit culture, but that the real problem is the chilling impact those words might have on others. Does this contribution to an already exclusionary climate rise to the level of oppression?
This is way too much ado about nothing.
From the evidence presented, and what I know about Spurgeon, there is no grand misogynistic conspiracy to belittle women and barricade them from a seat at the comics criticism table. Spurgeon and his sardonic wit “picks on” all comers, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual preference and national origin.
The critics table is there for anyone with an opinion and a keyboard. Just pull up a chair and start writing. But you’d better be real thick-skinned, because if you plan to dish it out, you damn well better be prepared to take it.
Let me repeat: You’d better be real thick-skinned, because if you plan to dish it out, you damn well better be prepared to take it
Back in the 1970s, when comic book collecting was in its infancy, there were not a lot of females around. I’d hazard to guess that at the Chicago minicons I went to every month during the early- to mid-1970s, female attendance was, at best, one or two percent. Today, however, I’d hazard a guess that at most cons I go to, the average number is in the 30-40 percent range. A few I’ve been at may even had higher percentages than that.
So the audience, and opportunity, is there.
Having a bunker mentality, and thinking everyone is out to get you, is not going to help you on your quest to break into ANY endeavor. When it comes to criticism, you need to write what you want, the way you want to, and ignore any real, or imagined, “trashings.”
The bottom line is that no one cares more about your stuff than you do — except (maybe) your mom. Critique yourself, first and foremost. And while it’s OK to read the opinions of others about your work, you’ve got to learn to take what’s said impersonally. Reject what is nonsense, or what stems from poor research or bad information. The rest you can ponder, or if you’re real stubborn — like me — you can reject that as well.
I do know this… if I had listened to all of the critics and naysayers I met over the years, my skill sets and experiences would have been severely muted.
Kim didn’t say there was a great misogynist conspiracy, Russ.
It’s true that everyone has to endure criticism, and success is always difficult for anyone. This can lead people to conclude that their achievements are based on their own personal toughness and virtue, and that anyone who complains about inequities is just a whiner. I would submit that that’s a quite blinkered perspective. Meritocracy is largely a myth, success has to do with luck, and luck has a lot to do with being the right sort of person, in various senses.
Noah,
Re: meritocracy.
Agree 100%.
Noah — Sure she did. She said, Tom’s attitude was, “Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.”
In other words, the “male cabal” environment, which Tom is either a part of, or is ignorant of, is what’s holding potential women critics back.
That is nonsense. In today’s environment, where anyone can leverage the Internet, the only thing holding anyone back is themselves.
In the old days, things were different. There were very limited venues for mass communication, and many of those had gatekeepers with various agendas.
Re: Meritocracy. So you think it’s largely a myth, and that most things in life are based on luck?
Nonsense. While luck can a factor (good or bad), luck generally favors those who are prepared — i.e., those with the right skills, the right attitude (which includes the ability to adapt when the unexpected “bad luck” happens), and the right amount of measured risk management.
Of all the dozens of jobs I’ve had over the years, almost every single one was meritocracy-driven — either during the initial hiring, for advancement, or for both. I got hired because I had the right skill sets for the job, and I advanced because I had enhanced those skills through training or formal education.
I “lucked out” a couple of times, but I lucked out only because I had the right qualifications to fill the position.
I’d also argue that while it’s true that working hard may still result in failure, I guarantee that not working hard will almost definitely result in failure. It’s basic risk management.
“That is nonsense. In today’s environment, where anyone can leverage the Internet, the only thing holding anyone back is themselves.”
Everyone can’t leverage the internet. You need internet access; you need computer skills; you need writing skills. All of those things are very dependent on money and social position.
This seems pretty obvious to me. If it doesn’t to you, I don’t really know that this conversation is going anywhere productive. And if you really think you’ve succeeded because you’re awesome and other’s aren’t…well, you know, welcome to America. Lots of people agree with you; it’s the state religion.
Edit: Lots of people agree that they, each individually, have succeeded because they are awesome, that is. They don’t all agree that Russ has succeeded because he is awesome.
Noah — You see, you know nothing about my past, and you make assumptions based on your liberal biases and your preconceptions. You assume because I’m an old white guy, I had a privileged social position, upbringing and am ignorant of what it’s like to be “poor” and “disadvantaged.”
Well, for the record, my older sister and I were raised by a single parent for the first nine years of our lives. My biological father dumped us when I was an infant, and never paid any child support. When we were real young, my mom was lucky enough to get a job tinning solder leads at home for a local electrical manufacturer. It didn’t pay much, and she suffered from malnutrition so we’d have enough to eat, but at least she could look after us. She tried to get public assistance, and was refused because she allegedly made “too much.”
Later, when we were school-aged, circa 1959, my mom got a low-paying secretarial job downtown. And since there’s no way she could afford a regular baby-sitter, my sister and I were latch-key kids before the term was invented. We routinely played hooky and several times practically destroyed the apartment, so when my mom eventually came home from work, she was reduced to tears. We weren’t evil kids, just unsupervised.
I’m virtually certain I had ADHD, because the school was constantly telling my mom what a disruptive “problem” I was — so much so that in first or second grade they had me specially tested because, according to my mom, they thought I was retarded. I was always daydreaming, not following directions, talking too much, or causing other problems.
We always wore hand-me-downs from family friends, and I remember that for one Christmas, my mom brought in a box of used toys someone had given her and we got to “pick out” our presents for that year. Luckily, my sister and I had three aunts, so other Christmases were more bountiful.
I met my biological dad once that I can remember. Shortly after my sister was hit by a car and almost killed, he suddenly popped up one day. All I remember is being introduced to him and shaking his hand. After that, he disappeared again. My mom was finally able to scrape up enough money to divorce him, and a year or so later re-married. My new dad, a truck driver with a baby son, adopted us, which is why I have a Greek last name but am, at best, an honorary Greek. Like us, my new dad didn’t have a car, because he was helping care for his mom, dad, and sister.
Within two years my mom had two more kids, and there were seven of us in a small three bedroom apartment. At one point, the three boys were in one bedroom, the two girls in another, and my parents were in the third. The rear of our apartment was over a tavern, and since we had no air-conditioning, we slept with the windows open. Many a summer night I fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning serenaded by the raucous singing of a bunch of drunks. Our apartment always had a cockroach problem – so much so that when we’d shut off the lights to sing happy birthday, by the time we lit the candles, blew them out, and turned the lights on again, there’d be roaches scurrying on the ceiling or walls. I grew up thinking every household had a monthly exterminator visit to spray the baseboards.
There’s so much more, but you get the point. I paid for my comics with pop bottle deposit money, birthday cash, and paper-route money. I also shoveled snow in the winter. As I got older, for extra money I regularly bought a dealers table for $5 and hustled comics every month at the YMCA mini comic cons. In junior high, I bussed lunchroom tables because money, as always, was tight. In high school, I couldn’t afford to go to any proms, couldn’t afford a school ring, and I didn’t buy a yearbook until the year I graduated. College was never even an option for me after high school, and I went to work part-time after school six months before graduation. As soon as I went to work after high school, I started paying my parents room and board — $100 a month (early on, about a quarter of my earnings). I didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 22 because a car was also never an option until then. I worked a variety of manual labor jobs until I joined the Air Force at the age of 24.
In short, I’m a blue-collar guy from a blue-collar family. Luckily, I stayed away from drugs, avoided serious altercations with the cops (dumping friends when they started stealing motorcycles and other stuff), and when I finally started to get my shit together, I began to think before I did stuff. Eventually, I took control of my life, left the old neighborhood behind, and never looked back.
I was NEVER handed anything, and so I have little sympathy for those who whine that they are being “held back” by what I consider to be minor speed bumps, or that they are underprivileged. Lots of people are “underprivileged” and have obstacles to overcome – some infinitely more challenging than anything I ever had to deal with. Yet they find a way to persevere.
Russ, I’m not assuming anything about you. I’m telling you that, no matter who you are, success has a lot to do with luck. You reference luck in your post there. And luck also has to do with privilege, in numerous ways, big and small. (If you were gay, how would that have affected your military career?)
Again, everybody faces hardships. You overcame more than me, but less than some people. But, as just one example, the fact that Louis Armstrong succeeded doesn’t mean that Jim Crow didn’t matter.
My OP has literally nothing to do with meritocracy or TCJ rejecting women writers.
I do not think TCJ rejects women writers.
Yeah, sorry, we’ve drifted somewhat far afield.
If you accept that Tom was subtweeting a certain presentation of Chute, of which my piece was the latest example–which for the record I do not, though I have no wish to press the point further–then fine, let me stand up for those other pieces too. I for one haven’t seen anything that has exaggerated her accomplishments or positioned her as the founding mother of comics scholarship. And if a body of work like that does in fact exist, I don’t see its connection to my piece.
My presentation of Chute was shaped by a lot of factors. One is that she straight-up deserves it. I admire her deeply. Another is an accident of timing; she’s coming of age professionally just as this relatively new subdiscipline of comics studies has begun to coalesce (within the academy–obviously there’s a rich tradition outside of it). Yet another is her social connections with cartoonists, which in part made her conference possible. I spoke to all of these things in my piece. I stressed her importance (1) because it’s literally descriptive and (2) because I want to put eyes on what’s happening right now in terms of canon formation, which is something I personally worry about–not because I want it to be “correct,” but because I want it to showcase more cultural diversity. How on earth Lucy Caswell fits into that discussion (or a discussion of a book that Hillary wrote) is beyond me. I take umbrage with Tom suggesting that I write about Lucy Caswell, or anyone else who has written about Hillary Chute write about Lucy Caswell, whether it’s in a pompous tweet or a friendly comment, though I certainly prefer the latter. Caro is right. If he is so worried about preserving her legacy, he should do it himself. She sounds really cool.
But I digress. I was never my intention for this discussion to be about who’s the greatest comics scholar.
It seems worth pointing out that the title of this essay is not I think “Tom Spurgeon is a Male Chauvinist.” It is “Tom Spurgeon Subtweeted Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Long Essay.” Of course now I have something else in addition to this lousy long essay. I have a lousy long comment thread.
Let me tell you something that may not be obvious: I HATE READING THE COMMENTS. As a general rule, I avoid them because I think they’re bad for the soul. I always read them for my own work but I rarely respond. I have read negative comments about my writing that I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot-pole. It’s not how I prefer to engage.
Against my own personal policy, I have been super committed to this comments thread because guess what, that’s where this conversation lives by definition. My OP was a comment on a comment. A lot of people rightfully find that off-putting because the whole exercise is a Keanu Reeves WHOA-level meta mindfuck of comments on comments on comments. But I have a dream, people…a dream for a society in which we can all close our tabs without reading the comments.
Meanwhile, the conversation lives in the margins. One of the most interesting things I’ve read all year was a comment Peggy Burns wrote in response to a discussion on TCJ, which was itself about a comment that Nicole Rudick sent to CR. Why wasn’t Nicole’s comment the biggest news story of the year? Peggy asked.
The answer, I posit, is because it’s too many levels of abstraction. To follow the story of why women aren’t writing for TCJ, there is only one primary source: the women not writing for TCJ. I speak here as one of them because I correctly identified it as platform that would support that.
And in doing so, off the top of my head, I have been characterized as secretly insecure, crazy, thin-skinned, paranoid, etc., and the subject of my OP has been described as a “male cabal,” a “grand misogynistic conspiracy,” a character assassination, and a pointless piece of whining that somehow diminishes female circumcision or honor killings.
TCJ.com co-editor Tim Hodler stomped into these comments like a petulant child and call me a liar because I dared to point out a blind spot and criticize the obvious faults with his website. He then reeled off a short list of women as though I had accused TCJ of never publishing a woman. And then he ghosted. *slow clap* I don’t think anything could have better proved my points.
Tom Spurgeon, on the other hand, wrote what were far and away the most insightful and intellectually generous comments by anyone here who pretty strongly disagrees with me. I deeply appreciate it. I wrote this as a rebuke for specific behavior and a comment on a milieu, not a character assassination or a comment on Tom’s commitment to diversity, which I take to be very sincere and commendable. If these comments don’t drive me to seppuku, I intend to write to CR to thank him for it.
You want a critical dialogue, but don’t like reading one. Sure.
I’m always skeptical of the assertion that “women” are put off by some toxic critical environment when, as the original post and comments thread demonstrate, women can be and are just as “toxic” as men. They give as well as they receive. What exactly is the enlightened approach thought to be “feminine” on display here that is somehow more welcoming to women? I say that as one who in no way wishes to discourage women from being just as nasty as men. That’s equality and I’m all for it. I just don’t see anything as magically improving in the general pigheaded nature of humanity should more women participate in the conversation and tradition of slaughter. It just doesn’t seem to be pigheadedness that keeps women from wanting to share their views (which, again, aren’t any less obnoxious or unfair than the boys).
Charles, it’s not about particular ways of interacting, necessarily, I don’t think. It’s about who’s in the club and who isn’t. Women CEOs won’t necessarily behave especially differently if they’re CEOs, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of CEOs aren’t women is in part the result of boys clubs networks and discrimination.
Kim – First, you write an essay that raises an issue – including naming names, and making charges – and then, after it’s published, and the comments start to flow, you downplay some of your own points, and what the essay is, in effect, saying.
In your Hillary Chute essay/interview, which is the foundation for your HU essay, you make statements that you must have known would be challenged.
For example, you state “Chute has emerged as the foremost comics scholar of our time, as well as one of the few female voices in the world of pop criticism.” And while the latter is certainly true, the former is eye-popping hyperbole.
Chute is definitely a heavyweight comics scholar, and she’s definitely exploring what’s new and ground-breaking, but “the foremost scholar of our time?”
No bloody way.
She’s not even the foremost FEMALE comics scholar of our time (since you insist on hammering on the issue of gender). Tom Spurgeon rightfully mentioned Lucy Caswell in his tweet reactions to your essay/interview, and while that’s a reasonable suggestion, I’d argue that it’s actually Maggie Thompson, who has been the foremost female comics scholar for more than 60 years. I’d even argue that when it comes to top 10 comics scholars of our time of ANY gender, Maggie is definitely in the mix.
Spurgeon did not question your “journalistic integrity” when he took umbrage with your statement. He was just pointing out, in his own wry way, just how over-the-top your opinion was.
Another example? You take “The Comics Journal” to task for having a 30-0 male-to-female critical essay/review/interview ratio on their Web site. And while I happen to agree wholeheartedly with your charge, and laugh at TCJ’s flimsy protestations, there’s no way that statement was going to go unchallenged. Comments about that topic would invariably generate comments.
Such is the life of any critic.
I don’t know if it’s a mistake on the way you worded that, Noah, but we agree … for the moment, at least.
Maggie Thompson just ain’t a “scholar” in the way Chute is a scholar. Obsessive fanboyism isn’t the same as scholarly activity. Come on, Russ.
Noah wrote: “I’m telling you that, no matter who you are, success has a lot to do with luck.”
Absolutely not true. In the majority of instances, success depends on hard work and wise choices. Luck can be a factor, of course, but you’re attempting to elevate it to a far loftier level than it deserves.
For example, if one wants to be a successful electronics engineer, a lot of squares have to be filled first, and none of them involve “luck.”
I think the “luck” you are alluding to involves things like who your parents are, what your cultural background is, what your social level is, and what your race is.
That’s all nonsense — at least in the United States. There are so many examples of people who had nothing here and ended up successful, it makes your assertion totally preposterous.
Yes, there are class and other speed bumps here, but none are insurmountable barriers, as is the case in other countries — provide one has the right attitude, drive, and perseverance. The other key factor is aptitude — which falls under the category of making realistic choices and taking calculated risks. For example, one may simply not be engineer material, and no amount of shoe-horning will ever make it happen.
“Absolutely not true. In the majority of instances, success depends on hard work and wise choices. Luck can be a factor, of course, but you’re attempting to elevate it to a far loftier level than it deserves.”
We’ll just have to agree to disagree, Russ.
I don’t mean to sound disingenuous, but I don’t see why the OP (or my subsequent comments) has been characterized as toxic or vitriolic. It isn’t. Probably context has a lot to do with why it’s been perceived that way.
I mean, it was sharp. I meant for it to be. But it was not a hot take or a malicious insult.
I do want a critical dialogue. Largely, this comment thread has not been it for the reasons I have tried to explain. Much of it has been a referendum on how I expressed my opinion, or whether I should have done so at all. All I can say is I did so in the only way I knew how, to the best of my ability.
Russ, far be it from me to prevent you from disseminating your preposterous belief in the bootstrapping myth or lauding your own personal accomplishments, but it is straight-up out of scope and I have no further comment.
Charles — Have you every talked to, or worked with Maggie? You’re letting your old TBG vs. TCJ biases creep in.
Chute is a different type of scholar, with great academic creds, but she hasn’t been around long enough to have the extensive knowledge level of a Thompson or a Caswell.
That’s like arguing that Charles Hatfield is a much better comics scholar than a Mark Evanier, simply because Charles has better academic creds. That simply isn’t the case. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both contribute mightily to furthering comics history and criticism.
@Kim. I decided to stop participating in this thread because the hostility level had risen high enough that it no longer seemed productive, but since you seem to have taken offense at this choice, maybe it’s a good idea to come back one more time, clarify my stance as quickly as possible, and then leave the debate up to you and others.
You write:
“Public attack.” “Continued to attack” you. Truly, that’s fascinating. I’m pretty sure you’re the one who, in your last comment, implied I was a liar while *you yourself* misrepresented what happened. I calmly corrected you. And it looks like I’m going to have to keep on doing that.
I don’t know; you have referred to me and my words as “honestly weird,” “defensive,” “unwarranted,” “obnoxious,” and “SUPER obnoxious.” Those seem like personal attacks to me, but hey. Now I am “a petulant child.” I have not once attempted to characterize your motives or describe you negatively in any way. And in fact, I very explicitly did not call or imply that you were a liar, saying instead that I thought our difference of opinion was more likely due to “misunderstanding than malice.”
I do however continue to maintain that you have misrepresented my words, intentionally or not. Maybe the best thing to do would be to publish our entire DM exchange here verbatim, so that readers can decide for themselves. Please do that or grant me permission to do so.
Because, as I have said before, I agree with your larger points. I think the comics community has traditionally been and continues to be unwelcome to women in various ways, some of them subtle, and many probably invisible even to those perpetrating them. I think the examples you have used to illustrate your argument here, including Tom Spurgeon’s tweets, are a bit of a stretch at best, but people can reasonably disagree. I have also said repeatedly that I have absolutely no problem with you or anyone else criticizing TCJ.com for its relative lack of woman writers or any other real and/or perceived flaw with the site. I think that is a valuable thing to do, and I genuinely appreciate the feedback. I never would have argued with you if that is where you left it.
As I have stated from the beginning, I have only two real issues with your post: I think it was wrong of you to make a private conversation public, and I think it was doubly wrong of you to (in my opinion) misrepresent that conversation. Again, obviously you disagree. Print the exchange verbatim, in context, and I will have no cause for complaint.
Two more real quick things: You have been upset with me for going into details about the women who have been published (and who we plan to publish) at TCJ.com. I admit again as I have admitted repeatedly that what we have done is not enough. And I am sorry if it was wrong for me to go into it, but in your original post, you complained that in our brief DM exchange I hadn’t taken the time to explain to you what we were doing in that regard. It seems that I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
Finally, you wrote:
I don’t think your saying “no worries” spreads a toxic cloud. I never said that, just like I never said most of the words you are putting in my mouth in these comments of yours. Do I think your DM was a huge deal? No. Do I think that TCJ suggesting a “correction” for something that wasn’t even a mistake is indicative of its problematic relationship with women? Yes. I really do.
Well, in fact, in your original post, you did express disapproval of my writing “no worries” and said nothing to indicate that my initial message was inappropriate. But fine, let’s change the focus. Here is what happened from my point of view. I read your story. In it, you wrote that on the front page of TCJ.com, there were no stories or reviews written by women. I thought to myself, Is that true? I hope not. Let me check. When I went to the site, I saw right on the top, a feature interview conducted by a woman that had been on the front page for the previous four days. I sent you a quick, polite note letting you know, and complimenting your piece, and not requesting a correction or apology or anything else, saying in fact that I agreed with you on it being a problem for the site in any case. When you explained that when you wrote the piece that article had not been there, I thought that was a fine stance to take, and didn’t press the issue at all. I can understand why you would be upset if I had pressed the matter, or made some kind of stink about it, but I didn’t. I thought you were well within your rights! (If I had been you, I probably would have changed it to “only one story on the front page” which, let’s face it, is bad enough, but I had and have no problem with your decision otherwise.) Let’s publish the exchange. I think it’s best that readers don’t have to depend on either my or your characterization.
Because here’s the thing: if you write online, people are going to occasionally let you know they think you got something wrong. Sometimes those corrections are warranted, and sometimes they’re not. I am alerted to possible errors on TCJ.com several times a week. As long as the people telling me are polite, I have not once taken offense, even when their suggestions are mistaken. In fact, I greatly appreciate it when people do this. I want the site to be as good as possible, and fixing factual errors can only improve it.
In my experience, if it is a simple, easily fixable mater, the most preferable way by far for this to happen is via private exchange of emails or direct messages, so as to avoid unnecessary controversy or hurt feelings on either side. This is accepted practice. I have received emails from Noah about mistakes on TCJ.com; I have sent Noah emails about mistakes on HU. I have exchanged similar emails about errors with Tom Spurgeon. I have exchanged them with Heidi MacDonald, and many others. Not once in my experience has anyone taken umbrage at this. And of course, this practice is not confined just to comics or the comics internet; misunderstandings or mistakes will happen no matter what you write about, whether you are a man or a woman, and women are just as capable and willing to notice errors as men.
Look, I’m more than willing to believe that as a man I have blind spots regarding the treatment of women; in fact I am sure that I do. This is an issue of importance to me, and one on which I regularly seek out consultation from other perspectives. If there’s something wrong with the way I wrote to you, I’d be happy to listen and learn from readers who think so. But I’d prefer that the people judging me were judging me on what I actually wrote and was responding to, rather than via secondhand description.
I meant for the third paragraph of my previous comment to read, “I don’t know.”
Tim, I fixed the third paragraph per your comment.
Russ et al., the fact that Chute got an entire issue of Critical Inquiry dedicated to comics is a pretty strong argument for her being, at least, the most influential/powerful comics scholar working today. I think it’s a defensible claim; I think there’s value in offering up alternatives but I’m doubtful there’s value in actually ARGUING about it.
I’ve read plenty of Maggie over the years, yes. There’s nothing scholarly about it. I wouldn’t call Groth a scholar (in the way Hatfield or Chute are), either.
Kim, I think you take about as uncharitable a reading of others as you can. That’s what’s “toxic” about it. I certainly don’t think there’s anything more “inviting” in your style than anyone else’s. (But, again, I don’t think you’re obligated to be any more inviting.) As for the comments, it almost seems like you’re saying people should only respond in the way you want, rather than the way they see fit … kind of like a tweet that supposedly says you should cover the tweeter’s preferred scholar over yours.
Charles — I’m sorry, but I can’t dismiss someone’s work simply because they are not an accredited academic.
I respect scholarly creds as much as the next person, but I also know that, over the years, there has been plenty of terrific insight and thoughtful perspective from the great unwashed as well.
Sixty-odd years of experience should not be taken lightly, methinks.
@Caro— Thanks.
Caro — I don’t disagree with your assessment of Chute’s contemporary comics criticism standing. But as powerful as it is, she still has a lot to learn. And, I’ll wager she’d be the first to admit that.
@Tim Hodler First and foremost I note for the record the difference in substance and tone between this comment and your previous comments.
I don’t have time to engage with the substance of your comment at the moment, though I will when I can. Meanwhile, by all means, I WILL RELEASE THE DMs.
TCJ: Just wanted to let you know Annie Murphy did our Rick Geary interview on the front page. (Agree w/ yr larger point, which we’re working on.)
TCJ: Oh, and forgot to say — liked your piece!
KO: Oh cool, glad to see it. That interview wasn’t up when I was writing. (piece was finished a while ago)
KO: And thank you so much, I consider that such a high compliment.
TCJ: No worries. And you’re welcome!
I have never once tried to misrepresent this exchange, which I characterized in the OP as amiable. I certainly do not think you should have complimented my piece further, or taken the time to explain to me what you’re doing at TCJ to be more inviting to women (which, by the way, I take to be nothing). I simply commented on the absurdity of your (continued) belief that my piece at Pacific Standard warrants a correction. I think your statement here that you yourself would have made a correction bears out my feeling that this is a blind spot for you as an editor. My larger observation, which I wanted to make public, was that TCJ should put its money where its mouth is, and I made some concrete suggestions as to how I think you could go about doing so.
@Charles, I can bemoan the state of the comments without wanting to police them. That does not make me a hypocrite. Nor does not expressing a distaste for comments sections in general.
Russ, the title of Kim’s article was “The Academic of Comic Books.” The word “scholar” in the context of this thread is a synonym for academic, which is a professional designation. That is common; it’s why “independent scholar” makes sense. We can fight over whether it should be reclaimed for less professionalized purposes, but maybe that’s also somewhere between semantic and off topic?
I stuck around in this thread because I didn’t want Kim to be the only female-person speaking and also because I was really hoping we could have a discussion about the gender issues Kim raised.
It would be nice if we were at the point where a woman could say “this gender issue bothers me” and have the topic treated as something worth discussing in its own right rather than simply as an excuse to shine a really unflattering shade of limelight on every turn of phrase and emotional
frustration that woman – who is a human being like everybody else as Charles points out – happens to display. That sort of thing happens a lot online; the Internet often seems to bring out the worst in everybody.
But these questions around diversity are important questions, and if we constantly get derailed into wallowing in our own human assholery and friendlier-than-thou posturing we’ll burn up all the time available without ever talking about anything that matters or anything that could make a difference. I guess I think that’s sort of “toxic” because it ends up meaning we never talk about gender, we only talk about this one woman who said this one thing that one time. So please? I have stuff to do but I would really like the conversation to happen!
@Kim. Thank you for posting that. And as I just said for the third or fourth time, I had and have no problem with you not making a correction. On the rest of it, I invite readers to decide for themselves.
The myth of the self made man is largely selection bias. You never hear from the people who worked every bit as hard and didn’t achieve whatever arbitrary level of success that some hard working self starter achieved.
And those hard working self starters tend to forget about all the help they had along the way, be it from individual benefactors or private & public institutions.
As far as luck goes it’s huge. Anyone who was born white, male, and above average intelligence basically hit a winning lottery number.
It’s the myth of the meritocracy that allows people to equate taxation with theft, which is a very dangerous road we’re careening down in this country today.
Hey Caro. So…I’m not entirely sure what sort of conversation you’re asking for, but…in terms of ways to get more women involved in writing in comics spaces– I think one thing is, or can be, genre issues and canon issues. That is, at tcj, for example, Crumb has long been the iconic comics god figure (this is the print version; Dan and Tim’s interests are somewhat different). A publication that thinks that Crumb is the thing is a publication that is probably maybe going to have more trouble attracting women contributors, both because the criticism seen as important or worthwhile is likely to come from men, and because women are likely to feel that this is not the magazine they want to write for, or that they fit in to.
Not that all women dislike Crumb’s work or anything (Aline Kominsky-Crumb is a fan, as just one example), but just in general his work is not super smart about gender and is arguably often sexist.
There are analogous issues with genre. If you’re more interested in superhero comics than in shojo (which is more or less the case for me) that makes a big difference in terms of the gender component of the people who are going to be reading you and feel like they want to engage with you. I try to get around that in various ways (mostly by being really open to people writing about whatever genres) but I think it’s an issue with parts of the comics critical community.
Not sure if that’s what you were looking for, but it’s my best shot!
I’d be interested in hearing Tim’s thoughts on these issues as well. Maybe I can convince Kailyn to weigh in too…
The most interesting thing to me in Kim’s piece was the last bullet about the “modern article,” and it hasn’t really been discussed. It seemed like such a … loaded? odd? coded? … thing to say, to call it “modern”. I commented on it earlier a bit but I think it’s still pretty underexplored.
But I’d certainly welcome more discussion about gender diversity broadly defined as well. Even toxicity, although that’s probably a keg of worms – just discussion less about individuals than what this comments thread deteriorated into.
Caro — I’m actually quite sympathetic about gender bias in comics. It’s still a male-centric biz, but on the plus side, it’s changed dramatically since the 1970s. And as more women enjoy and create comics, their influence will continue to have an impact across the board.
It’s certainly a big tent, and it has room for everyone.
I don’t think mainstream comics has changed that much in terms of gender representation. The biggest change in the industry, as far as that goes, is manga, which has essentially outsourced comics genre fiction for women to Japan because we can’t figure out how to do it ourselves. Which isn’t super impressive on our part, I wouldn’t say.
The point about “modern” is interesting. Comics is really unusually obsessed with nostalgia in a lot of ways (that’s both mainstream and indie.) Nostalgia is innately conservative, and I think it does create problems in terms of gender representation. The uproar over the new Thor is an example.
Tom’s referencing an earlier women comics scholar, so it’s obviously complicated — but I think there is a mistrust of the modern in comics in various ways and venues that can cause static with progressive social goals.
Well, actually, progressive movements try to be very conscious of their history, and any piece that glibly sets a pioneer’s cap on its subject is going to get flak. Andrew Sullivan had some heated things to say not so long ago on his blog about some histories that gave credit for progress in gay marriage rights to recent figures alone. Unrelated to politics, it’s always seemed to me that the alternative comics press suffers from a push to lionize young cartoonists who haven’t done much more than show promise.
Kim, that defense only works if Tom was policing you by objecting to how you approached your article. The only real difference is that you’ve chosen for rhetorical purposes to call his objection ‘policing’ and your objections to the comments here mere objections.
Caro, the OP targeted individuals while merely asserting a structural basis for the individual behavior. Thus, I’d suggest any devolution to particulars was, in fact, with us at the beginning. Few ever make a truly structural argument when it comes to this stuff. Instead, it’s a lot of just-so causal theorizing from limited examples.
Russ, I’m dismissing MT on content alone. I don’t care if she ‘s a scholar or not.
Zan wrote “Unrelated to politics, it’s always seemed to me that the alternative comics press suffers from a push to lionize young cartoonists who haven’t done much more than show promise.”
True, but to be fair, that’s a common fault with the newsmakers for lots of disciplines — artistic or otherwise.
For example, in the sports world, the quest to do stories about the next Michael Jordan, etc., seem endless. But in the vast majority of instances the “new phenom” turns out to be a bust.
It’s true in the arts (“Joe Sixpack is shaking up the art world!”), the financial community (“Read about the hot new IPO that can’t miss!”), et al.
Noah wrote “I don’t think mainstream comics has changed that much in terms of gender representation.”
I guess it depends on when your clock starts. From my perspective, the portrayal of women in comics has changed a lot since the 1960s, when characters like Sue Storm regularly threw their hands in front of their mouths when confronted with some dire emergency — or simply fainted.
Ohhhh…yes, the portrayal of women has arguably advanced somewhat in some areas. The number of women creators is still vanishingly small, though.
“actually, progressive movements try to be very conscious of their history,”
There’s a difference between being conscious of history and fetishizing the past. I’d say comics often does the latter, which can actually get in the way of doing the former.
I would like to echo Caro’s comment about focusing on the issues I raised instead of me.
I tried to put 2-4 men (depending on whether or not you count Dan Nadel and Gary Groth) on the spot for specific actions. In doing so, many of my own actions (and, to some degree, my character) have been doubted and interrogated. The specific actions of the 2-4 men have been minimally discussed. Further, the hostile milieu I identified has been reenacted, but largely denied, by most (though not all) of the people in this comments thread, almost all of whom are men.
Such are the systemic barriers to women writing about comics. To quote the giant on Twin Peaks, IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN.
And it happens all the time in many other milieus with far worse implications. Believe me, I am deeply grateful that the stakes of my own situation are so low and that I am here by choice.
Charles Reece, your comments, like so many others here, have so many egregious logic problems that I don’t even know where to start. If you want to continue to make me stand trial–which I fully expected, but do not enjoy–that’s within your power. Just know it makes you a jerk.
I would also like to co-sign Noah’s comments about R. Crumb (which I believe to be very perceptive), and to thank Caro for being here in my lousy long comment thread, not only because she has articulated many of my beliefs better than I could, but because her words have made me feel less alone.
“There’s a difference between being conscious of history and fetishizing the past…”
But how does that relate to Spurgeon’s comments, Noah?
Tom mentioned “modern” in a general way as being a kind of bad thing. I think the context in which “modern” is seen as bad could arguably be seen as the same context in which folks like Chris Ware or Seth or many maintream fans tend to look somewhat longingly to the past.
Well, here’s the first thing that comes up when I Google Caswell:
“The [Billy Ireland Cartoon Library &] Museum’s founder and former curator is Lucy Shelton Caswell, author of several books on cartooning, including Illusions: Ethnicity in American Cartoon Art (Ohio State Libraries, 1992) and Arnold Roth: Free Lance (Fantagraphics, 2001). The Cartoon Library began in 1977 when the Milton Caniff Collection was donated to Ohio State and delivered to the School of Journalism, which was headed by Caswell.” -Wikipedia
So the historical concern that prompts someone to say “hey, what about Caswell?” doesn’t seem like the kind of “nostalgia” for an innocent, magical time that gave us Driving Miss Daisy and Gone With the Wind.
Mentioning Caswell is totally legit and reasonable. Mentioning “modern” as a bad thing in an offhand way like that raises some questions, for me — and I think for Caro, if I understand her correctly.
Funny how it’s okay for Kim to put 2-4 men on the spot for their actions, but putting her back on the spot for her actions, i.e. “making her stand trial” makes you a jerk. Sort of how it’s okay for her piece to be sharp, but rebuttals similar in tone create a hostile milieu.
Yeah, she’s pro debate, as long as you concede she’s won it before it starts.
Tom’s tweets have been discussed plenty, what else would Kim like addressed?
1. I believe (and I don’t think I’m alone) that Kim’s characterization of the tweets is unreasonable and overreaching.
2. For some reason, Tom coming by to clarify the intent and meaning of his tweets doesn’t matter on iota, because Kim believes that her interpretation of the words are paramount here.
3. Kim wants additional focus on Tom’s actions although she’s made it very clear that those actions (2 tweets) don’t have any impact on her at all. But they might on some hypothetical victim of the toxic environment Tom perpetrates.
4. It’s two tweets! Maybe I’m too old, but it seems to me that a tweet ought to carry very little weight in any discussion. It’s a throwaway medium. As if the character count limitations weren’t enough of a barrier to clarity, Twitter isn’t the sort of place where people put a lot of thought into what they’re saying most of the time. Kim couldn’t even be bothered to respond by twitter.
5. Kim is utterly intractable on the topic, so what’s the point of engaging? I get the impression that any number of the more measured posters here don’t see Tom’s posts meaning what Kim thinks they mean.
My take on the Tim Hodler conversation whether it’s Kim’s interpretation, Hodler’s interpretation or the transcript is to say “Huh?, there’s no there, there.”
I understand that there are some larger underlying issues to discuss here, but if the the way to access these issues are really questionable interpretations of a really small amount of text, then those are going to be discussed as well.
At the risk of being accused of being a man telling a woman what to write, there might be a better way to get the community to discuss those issues.
In any case, I wonder if all this was worth it to Kim. She has stated and restated that Tom’s posts have no impact on her. She’s too old, too self confident and too uninterested in comics to be discouraged by Tom’s toxic tweets. At the same time she bemoans the existence of this thread as adding to that environment, something she says she knew would happen.
Funny thing about all that, she takes Tom to task for contributing to the toxic environment, and suggests Tom censor himself so he doesn’t do that, but if that’s the case, why would she write her own article knowing how it would contribute to the toxic environment?
Spurgeon said “a modern article” in the sense of “current”, referring to pressure to convince the public that your subject is important and get to the point already. It’s the same tendency that led to treating Jesus as if he invented the Golden Rule, and that misattribution is fairly venerable.
I’m going to maybe leave this thread for the evening…but I guess I’d point out, following Caro, that folks have iterated and reiterated their judgments of Kim; not a whole lot new is being added on that topic, it doesn’t seem like. If people agree that it would be good to get more women in comics crit, maybe that would be a more useful thing to think about and focus on at this point in comments? or at least to passingly consider?
I was intentionally not participating in this thread because, whew, what woman wants to open herself up to what y’all are putting Kim through? But then, this is part of what Kim is trying to get at, isn’t it?
The fact that a thread can go on this long with women reading along (Hi, I’m a woman and I’m reading along) and only two women deeply participating in it and that’s not recognized by all the participants as being evidence that this way of engaging women makes women feel unwelcome is blowing my mind.
I am genuinely curious as to how you guys understand the lack of female participation in this particular conversation. Do you think Noah doesn’t have that many female readers? Do you think most female readers here just aren’t interested in issues that affect women? Do you just not recognize our non-participation as meaningful or what? Don’t you at least wonder if we see what’s happening to Kim and decide it’s just better to stay off your radar?
I think Spurgeon’s other tweet (“women, stop writing to me and start posting”) and Hodler’s DM signoff were at least dubious-sounding and deserved calls for clarification. But Spurgeon’s initial complaint seems reasonable to me and has been subject to several goofy constructions that only convince me that we’re seeing a search for a problem to justify the reaction. “‘Modern’?! Are you advocating a return to the days of slavery and dueling, sir?”
Dean Milburn, I don’t see why the amount of personal distress I felt when I read Tom’s tweets really matters. I may be old and have confidence in my ability as a writer, but if you think that I didn’t know that choosing to engage with this debate would be emotionally distressing to me–which, for the record, it very much is–you are not paying attention.
Last night, I said that I didn’t want to press the issue of whether or not Tom’s subtweets were about my piece specifically, and that I appreciate his participation in this discussion.
I have tried to speak honestly about an issue that matters to me.
I care very deeply about comics.
I think Betsy pretty much got it. As a woman (albeit a pseudonymous one), this comment thread makes me want to back away slowly.
Just saying.
I dunno. In most cases, if I have something to say, I say it. I don’t use a pseudonym, and anything I say online, I’d say to someone’s face. Sometimes, if I’m not in the mood, or I simply have more pressing things to do, I’ll shrug stuff off.
But let me be clear: Just because I argue with someone does not mean I have animosity towards that person because we disagree. And I certainly don’t carry around disagreements long-term like an albatross around my neck. I fire and forget.
What people say about you does not define you anyway. You define you. And if some people lash out at you, so what? It’s impossible to be liked by everyone, so it’s counterproductive to even try.
That said, if you really believe in what you say, you should be prepared to defend it — even if it involves real, or simply perceived, confrontation. And if you aren’t able to defend your stance, or you feel compelled to exaggerate or use hyperbole to defend it, than maybe you need to re-think things.
There are lots of reasons someone might want to use a pseudonym, including but not limited to the fact that women (for example) who speak up online can often face really unpleasant harassment, up to and including rape threats, death threats, and actual real life stalking.
This is perhaps a useful recent reference point.
By the way. My oldest daughter, who’s now in her 30s, loves comics, and draws and paints. But she’s never felt compelled to draw comic strips. She bounced around a few majors and settled on a career helping people with special needs. I always encouraged her to draw, and I think she’d be pretty good at strips, but ultimately it was her call. She opted out, and that was a loss for comics.
I was prepared to take some heat for this piece. It’s been a little more heat than I expected, and it’s bullshit for reasons I have tried to spell out, but let me be clear: I grant its right to exist, and I accept it.
I would not ask any other woman to accept it on my behalf. Frankly, ladies, the problem is worse than I thought.
To any other women (or silent men) who are reading this: hi. I would love nothing more than for you to join my lousy long comment thread. At this rate, I fear the Entwives will leave TCJ and HU forever, which is the opposite of what I intended.
That said, I understand you might not want to join for any number of reasons. You do you. I respect you for it.
Betsy and kinukitty, thank you for your perspectives.
“Charles Reece, your comments, like so many others here, have so many egregious logic problems that I don’t even know where to start. If you want to continue to make me stand trial–which I fully expected, but do not enjoy–that’s within your power. Just know it makes you a jerk.”
Or you could just address the egregious logic problems rather than calling me names. I mean, they’re egregious, so they must be easy to argue against. Such a welcoming environment, full of open discourse. This is really teaching TCJ something about civility.
I’m very happy to see Kim O’Connor call out the “be the change you want to see”-category of responses in her article, because I’ve always found that to be a grating, disingenuous deflection of criticism. I know I didn’t like it when Noah replied to Alyssa Rosenberg’s very measured rebuttal to his argument that the women’s prison show Orange is the New Black didn’t have enough men in it with the following tweets:
1) If Alyssa thinks that it’s important to talk about male representation on other television shows, I wld urge her to do that.
2) And I’d argue that Alyssa did in fact talk about that topic…because my piece spurred her to do so.
3) Which is actually an outcome that makes me happy. So thank you for the response
As you can see, it’s patronizing. So that’s why I also don’t care for seeing Caro taking that line with Tom Spurgeon:
“But the question I have is this: Why was it Kim’s responsibility to make that point in her article, rather than (e.g.) Tom’s, to make it in response to her?”
And I’m taken aback to see Kim herself turn around and do the same thing:
“I take umbrage with Tom suggesting that I write about Lucy Caswell, or anyone else who has written about Hillary Chute write about Lucy Caswell… If he is so worried about preserving her legacy, he should do it himself. She sounds really cool.”
Part of the problem here is that Kim seems determined to read Tom’s tweets as if he’s asking her to write about Lucy Caswell instead of Hillary Chute, or to write a followup piece about Caswell, when he’s obviously saying that “The Academic of Comic Books” treats Chute almost by default as a singular, trailblazing superheroine amid a void of female scholars, and is framing some indication of contingency and context as a difficult but necessary obligation for journalism.
And you know, I’d never heard of Caswell before this either, but a quick google search shows me a long interview that Spurgeon conducted with her for the Comics Reporter in January of this year. It looks as if he was the change he wanted to see, and in classic Hooded Utilitarian style everyone preferred to emote at length in public rather than perform even the most cursory efforts at research.
One factor that might explain the gender polarization in this debate is that people don’t really read comments threads. What they do is glance, socialize, and if they’re somehow made to feel as if their identity or way of life is under attack, then they do read the opposing side’s arguments very minutely in search of contradictions and hypocrisy. So Kim, at the risk of seeming paternalistic, may I venture a suggestion that if you post for this site again you more of an effort to be your own editor because Noah sure isn’t going to do it for you. One of the reasons that Noah can be such an INteresting writer, and debating him can be such an INteresting experience, is that he can’t even edit himself or give an inch of ground to the most painstakingly justified criticisms. Just scan your writing for things that a hostile reader will obviously try to get you on, like exaggerated readings that you don’t need to make your point, or claiming not to be bothered by things that obviously bother you, or attempts to foreclose and suppress a debate that you’re opening yourself, and it’ll be easier to keep your interlocutors on the defensive.
@deelish, Make no mistake. People are reading this thread, and I imagine that more people will read it for a long time after I get tired of talking back.
Your charges against Noah for being a bad editor are rich indeed, but they don’t surprise me. I’m not going to comment on his piece on OITNB–which I remember hearing about at the time, but have not read. I’m tired of diversions. I am here to talk about barriers to women writing about comics. What are YOU here for? To give me advice?
@Charles, my claim is not empty. The logic problems are egregious, but I’m juggling a lot of balls (both in this discussion and in real life), and my lousy long comment thread is only getting longer. I plan to go through the logic problems in Tim Hodler’s comments at some point, because that task seems to me the most important, but I don’t know that I’ll ever have the time or the fortitude to go through everyone else’s.
@Tim Hodler A quick question about the women whose names you invoked like a talisman in your initial comment:
“Second, here is an incomplete list of women writers (besides Kristy) who we have published in the last eight months or so: Shaenon Garrity, Nicole Rudick, Naomi Fry, Sarah Boxer, Whit Taylor, Annie Murphy, Cynthia Rose (she wrote today’s lead story for us), Karen Peltier, Jocelyne Allen, Zainab Akhtar, and Katie Skelly.”
Tim, I am wondering if you can speak to who, if anyone, recruited these women to write for TCJ. Was it you? Dan Nadel?
I know who recruited me to write for TCJ. It was Rob Clough.
Yeah; we’re not talking about my OITNB piece here. Folks want to talk about that, there’s a thread over here. Write about it there, deelish; try to sneak it in here again and I’ll delete it.
I wasn’t able to read any of the thread last night so I’m filtering through a lot sort of backwards and probably will miss things in this comment. I’ll try to catch up over the day.
Zan: I was treating the reference to “modern article” as basically separate from the reference to Caswell in particular. “Current” is so much more common a word – it seemed very loaded and interesting to use the word “modern.” Maybe “current” is all he meant but I thought it was interesting that he didn’t say that. But if he meant current, what would be the things that weren’t current? Like Gary’s stuff from the ’70s?
I do tend to agree with Noah, basically, although I think I express it differently: I think it has to do with a very intense interest in and commitment to what I earlier called “historical preservation.” There’s tremendous anxiety, it seems, that great comics work of the past will be (or has been) forgotten or overlooked. As I said in that comment, I’m supportive of those historical preservation efforts, but I don’t think an interest in that, or the ability to preface/contextualize every piece of writing in those terms, should function as a “password.” Writers should be able to make points without putting them into that context if they want to and not be corrected.
And that gets at why I said what deelish is chiding me for. The “why” in my question “Why is it Kim’s responsibility” is not rhetorical. I do not understand why it would be Kim’s responsibility to write about Caswell, period, or instead of Chute. She hasn’t asserted anything about herself or her work overall that implies that she’s doing some sort of anthologizing project, so while I am sympathetic and appreciative of other people bringing up other scholars that would be worth attention, I don’t see the necessity of that ALSO being a critique of Kim’s piece.
(I’m guessing the title maybe triggered some of that? But seriously, y’all, titles are hell. Some people are great at them but I think for the most part they’re either something you struggle to come up with and typically do a shitty job making up, or they’re something your editor tacks on because it’s gonna attract clicks. I WISH Noah would have titled my pieces ’cause I HATED doing it and he’s much better at it. I fall into this trap too of judging the body of a piece against its title, but it’s almost always a bad idea that ends up twisting everything and everybody in knots.)
OK, to return to the point about the commitment to historical preservation: as well intentioned as it is, it has the effect of narrowing what it means to be “talking about comics.” (In the American indie context, to save off Alex’s complaint.) And as I’ve said before, I think the more diversity there is within what it means to talk about comics, the more diversity of bodies doing that talking there will be. That touches on Noah’s point about genre, but I think it’s broader than just genre – comics is largely a cluster of subcultures – indie comics, art comics, manga, superhero, etc. – and they all function like subcultures. Despite the rhetoric, they do not function like genres within a medium. They are vastly more exclusionary than “mystery” or “tap-dance” or “painting.” All subcultures are about inclusion and exclusion and so there’s constant contesting for the terms. There’s a tension among genre and medium and subculture and as of now there is no umbrella culture that welcomes people in and connects people among the different subcultures and interests. There is no “comics culture”; there’s only an aggregate of many comics subcultures. Efforts to actively build that umbrella culture, and call attention when any subculture asserts dominance, maybe might make a difference.
I think it’s never going to be possible, especially on the Internet, to completely get rid of the way comments threads often reflect terrible manners and the worst of our impulses and generally people’s hackles getting up. I know an option is to close down comments, but to me personally, it’s worth the bad stuff to have the conversation, even though it’s difficult to avoid getting derailed.
But the narrower the dominant subculture is and the more the conversation conforms to that narrow vantage point, the more destructive that negativity will be, because you’re not only contesting for the right to speak as an individual, but also for the right to have an opinion or a perspective that doesn’t conform.
I’m on this topic, because it seemed to me that Tom’s tweets were pressing Kim in some ways to conform to the subculture more, to remember to value a certain kind of work, archival work, over other kinds of work. Hypothetically, what if Kim had asserted that Thierry Groensteen was “The Academic of Comics”? Or someone like Jan Baetens, who represents a perspective that is really important to the way people outside of this subculture think about multi-media work? There’s just a knee-jerk tendency to more or less agressively try and rein in things that aren’t familiar or comfortable or that stretch the conversation away from the things the subculture values most.
Maybe the people who have been lurking, reading this thread and going “oh man, I really don’t want to be part of that group” can weigh in on whether that jives with their perception?
And I realize this is a hard question to engage with. To some extent I’m interrogating WHERE the gender bias originates from. Is it inherent to the niche – as Noah’s critique of genre sort of implies? Would it actually attract more women to comics if the climate was less subcultural and exclusive and if the scope of things being discussed was more heterogenous? Or would it just dilute the focus to the point that the niche was lost?
Caro’s comment describes much more fully what I was trying to get at when I accused Tom of being “proprietary.” She also gets at what I meant in my OP about not aspiring to expertise, which is quite different than caring about comics.
I perceive much what TCJ publishes as savant-level discourse, and I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as a compliment. I think it is an important mode, but it is not the one in which I work.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t title my piece at Pacific Standard. That is common industry practice. Sometimes editors use the title I suggest; sometimes they don’t. In a perfect world they would always inform me of a change. I was not informed in this case.
I understand and agree w/Caro’s point about comic book vernacular history as a paddle with which insiders haze outsiders. This is especially pernicious given that while there has always been a female (and maybe to a lesser degree minority) presence in comics, the current comics scene (especially the indie and art scene) is more diverse than it has been in the past. Given this state of affairs, I can understand why a remark like Tom’s could cause a writer to throw up her hands in frustration (even if he didn’t mean for it to).
A couple of CR readers asked me to check this out since I bailed to see what I think and post something. I’m not sure I have anything of too much substance to add, but that’s rarely a prequisite for a thread of over 100 responses.
Like I wrote above, I appreciate the criticism and will hopefully learn and grow from it. I don’t agree with the characterizations of those tweets, but I don’t get to necessarily control that.
I made the Chute/Caswell tweet because while I admire Chute and her work very much and have enjoyed the articles about her and the conversations i’ve had about her, I think one outcome of the way she’s presented can be that we favor the now over the was. Caswell popped to mind. As much as I remember the provenance of tweets, I believe the tweet was instigated by reading Dan Nadel’s piece, finding it curious, e-mailing with Dan about it in critical fashion and then looking at a bunch of other pieces. Dan’s part of the sub-tweet, I guess, but I was really sub-tweeting a line of thinking, not so much anyone’s piece. Although I’m sure I read Kim’s, because I remember it; it was good.
Now, I’m not sure I’d defend my entire life that this is the best argument anyone has ever made or GODDAMN YOU I HAVE THE RIGHT TO THINK THIS THING, but I thought it was worth throwing out there at 150 characters or whatever, or at least thought so for that 31 seconds.
One thing that Kim’s piece reminds me is that maybe I don’t get to throw things out there like that, or at least that there are consequences for doing so.
I made the tweet to women I know that were writing me about a very specific issue of that moment to encourage them to write publicly about that specific issue and to let anyone out there in a similar place know that if they were having similar thoughts, they weren’t aberrant. I did this because I thought their opinion would be specifically valuable given the structure and nature of the issue in play. “Be the change you want to be” isn’t what I was thinking, and is sort of gross as a prescription. I understand in every way why people don’t post publicly, and wanted to add public encouragement to my private encouragement. The people I was speaking to not only aren’t “part of the problem” becuase the problem is the problem, they aren’t part of the problem because the people with whom I’m directly familiar are titans and aren’t part of any problem I can see.
One thing that Kim’s piece reminded me on that one is that sometimes what I think is a clear context for a piece isn’t so clear to other people, and I should be careful about that.
I repeat my call made above that I’m not sure was answered — it’s a long thread — that I’m perfectly happy for a part of this thread to be about all of CR’s shortcomings in terms of the criticisms aimed at TCJ, particularly what I could do to make things better more generally for writers of diversity, skill and scope beyond keeping industry shortcomings in mind in the areas of exploitation and diversity when I hire. If it makes the situation better I’m all for being kicked around the room for a while.
I’m also happy to focus any future pieces on my tweeting by answering questions about motivation or thinking ahead of time from the writer or an engaged editor; I’m also happy to facilitate criticism of anything I do related to CR at CR, or to drive attention to writing elsewhere that’s critical if I’m made to know about it.
Thanks for your attention to my writing.
Thanks, Kim! I forgot to mention it in my essay’s worth of comment up there, but I’d also be very interested in responses to Betsy’s questions. The participation of women in the thread is worth talking about. If other women in addition to kinukitty were lurking and are willing to speak up, I’d love to hear the range of reasons.
Thanks, Nate – your first sentence really encapsulates very eloquently and concisely what I was trying to say.
And in Tom’s very kind comment, it seems completely clear that it comes from a place of genuine caring about past things, but absolutely no desire at all to haze anybody.
That’s why I picked up on it, I think, because it seems to be a real place of misunderstanding, where things can get inadvertently really bad. The vernacular history and how people deal with it is a really significant part of this issue, I think.
As I wrote before, I’m not going to be able to participate in this comments thread any more. The most unavoidable reason for that is I’m going on vacation in a few hours and will be away from the internet for a week.
But I’m really more interested in listening than arguing any way. I accomplished the only thing I really wanted already, which was putting the DM exchange between myself and Kim into full context. In retrospect, I wish I had just made that simple request right at the beginning, but I can’t go back in time now.
Here’s that exchange again:
TCJ: Just wanted to let you know Annie Murphy did our Rick Geary interview on the front page. (Agree w/ yr larger point, which we’re working on.)
TCJ: Oh, and forgot to say — liked your piece!
KO: Oh cool, glad to see it. That interview wasn’t up when I was writing. (piece was finished a while ago)
KO: And thank you so much, I consider that such a high compliment.
TCJ: No worries. And you’re welcome!
I’m still unclear on what if anything is wrong with that, but I’m sincerely interested to hear what others think, either here or via email.
@Kim. You ask: Tim, I am wondering if you can speak to who, if anyone, recruited these women to write for TCJ. Was it you? Dan Nadel?
I know who recruited me to write for TCJ. It was Rob Clough.
I recruited some of those women, Dan recruited some, and Rob recruited some. Since you ended your original post with a request that we listen to Rob, I’m not sure why you seem to be holding it against us that we did!
In addition to those recruited, some of the women who have written for TCJ.com approached us directly, and I want to encourage any women reading this who have ambitions towards writing for TCJ to contact us. As previously stated, we are very interested in having more women write for the site. So if you are inclined, please go check out the site to get a feel for things if you aren’t familiar with it, and then let us know if you think you can contribute (or if you just have suggestions for story ideas or ways we can improve or whatever).
One thing possibly worth mentioning here: Another area we really need to beef up is our news coverage, so if there are any women you know who might interested in muckraking the industry’s business practices, we will be especially pleased to hear from you. But critics, interviewers, etc. are definitely more than welcome.
Other than that, I’m interested in hearing what people debate here. A humble suggestion: I do think that everyone involved on all sides (how many are there now? six or seven?) might do well to consider what they’re trying to accomplish in the conversation, and whether learning from others, changing minds, or point-scoring is the goal, what might be the best strategy for obtaining that. Internet debates often make it hard to keep priorities straight, as I know well from my own experience.
Full disclosure: I didn’t have the heart to read all 150+ comments. Here’s my thoughts, for what they’re worth.
I think that part of the comics world is like an old boys’ network, and that network is happy to come in a gang and tromp around. It’s a hyper-aggression area, I think, versus a micro-aggression area (which would be, oh, a more gender-mixed discussion, kicking back on a porch and shooting the shit).
I have to be fairly well-settled, emotionally, to dig into that kind of topic with the comics boys, because they sometimes travel in (internet) packs.
I think the younger generation is shifting things, strongly, the way they did with gay marriage. There’s a fairly depressing sexual harassment scandal (I’m guessing folks here are not following the Wiscon thing) that’s making clear to me that there is a serious generational divide, where the older generation (mine and maybe the one up above that) are still really mired in misogyny, even amongst the women, even amongst self-identified feminist women, but the younger generation is vehement that this shit is stupid and wrong and why are we arguing about it, conversation over, we’re going to play our video games/read our comics/watch our TV/write slash and the boys better fucking shut up and get over it, etc.
I don’t know. But I’ve been watching a couple of small scandals play out, and the younger generation has a whole different approach. It’s interesting, and gives me some hope.
Betsy Phillips,
I think there are any number of reasons women (or men for that matter) might not want to dive in here.
1. I’m certain that you’re correct that there are some women who don’t want “what’s happening to Kim” to happen to them.
I think a careful reading of this thread would indicate those fears are at least somewhat unfounded. Kim wrote what she characterizes as a “sharp” piece. I’d argue that it rises to the level of “attack” piece. The abrasive style Kim has chosen to use here, has been reflected back at her. A quick glance back at the thread indicates that responses to Caro are nothing like the responses to Kim.
Kim’s replies indicate that she believes that a lot of the specific criticisms leveled at her, are because she’s a woman, things like “Guess I’m just another woman reading too much into something a man said. ¯\_(?)_/¯ “, when nothing of the sort is going on. Kim’s article is full of problems that have nothing to do with the fact she’s a woman.
2. I think there are a lot of people, men and women, who don’t jump into comment threads because any point they’d make has already been made.
3. I think the longer a thread becomes, there will be fewer new readers and thus fewer new posters.
4. I also think it’s possible there are women readers who disagree with Kim, but have no desire to publicly take sides against her.
Kim, et al.
I’m checking out now, I think Noah made a great point that a lot of the thread has become belaboring points already made, and I’m more guilty of that than anybody.
I’d also like to apologize for any distress, emotional or otherwise I’ve caused anybody. I tend to forget that not everybody compartmentalizes their online life and their “real life” the way I do. This sort of sparring just doesn’t get to me. When I step away from the keyboard, or even switch browser tabs, this sort of thing goes into its own box.
I’ve learned a couple of things, and it’s led me to do some reading I wouldn’t have done otherwise, so thanks and so long!
The fact that @deelish sees my Pacific Standard piece “almost by default as a singular, trailblazing superheroine amid a void of female scholars” is a logic problem.
I did not say there’s a void of female scholars. There are a LOT of them (hurrah), though they do not all focus on comics exclusively.
It is a logic problem I also saw in Tom’s tweets, which as (I think) Caro has said press a value judgment on work that does not handle the archives in the way he would like to see them handled. I think he has respectfully pressed that value because he cares about it, whether or not he has not connected it to me personally. And I think that value should be politely interrogated. I care about the past, too, but I agree with Noah’s comment about the fetishization of the past, which I perceive as a hazard to healthy critical discourse.
What Tom has said about Dan’s piece is very interesting to me, and as soon as I am done with my lousy long comment thread I intend to process it and, if necessary, apologize.
I’ll say right now that I think Tom has been construed as a symbol of something that I don’t think he represents. I always took the context of his non-Chute tweet to be the Thor thing, and I tried to say I thought he meant well in my OP. I was trying to explain how it grates. Tom has shown me how maybe it also actually encouraged someone else instead of grating, which is cool.
I would like to thank Tom for his presence in these comments insofar as he wants to watch or participate. I think his participation is VERY valuable. And I would like to thank him for being very respectful to me, which many people have not been.
People have called me out for my tone, which I maintain is sharp. I am fighting for something, but I am trying my best not to do violence to anyone else’s ideas. I have tried not to be bitter or unfair, though I know some people think I’m both. I have always been angry (which I explicitly stated in the OP) and this comment thread has in large part made me feel angrier.
With regard to Dean Milburn’s final comment, I don’t doubt there are women reading who disagree with me. I do not speak for women. I speak for myself and for what I perceive as barriers to women writing about comics.
A lot of men in these comments have lauded their own emotional disengagement with these issues as though it is a personal accomplishment. Make no mistake: it is their privilege. I do not have it, and that is what Dean Milburn has called “an accident of biology.”
I do not know what I would call it. A sickness in our society, perhaps.
I have tried and failed to keep this conversation on track, so I appreciate Tim Hodler’s call for people to consider what they want to accomplish here. Perhaps people will listen to him. So far most people have not listened to my, or Caro’s, or Noah’s continued calls for focus on the issue of barriers to women writing about comics.
I’m checking out for the day but I will be back.
Kim, I wish I had taken the time to weigh in on your post when there were only three comments. I wasn’t sure what I could contribute then, especially when Tom’s motives were at issue. He has linked to my posts here at HU a couple of times and been supportive of my work; I am also familiar with his appreciation for Lucy Caswell and I wasn’t surprised that her name came up. But I realize that none of my personal experience is relevant here because your question – and the subsequent questions that others like Caro have posed – are more about the environment in which women comics critics are able to select their subjects freely, make claims about the material, and engage in meaningful conversations that help to expand and clarify those views. These are important questions.
I mostly write about race and comics, but I’m also a black female college professor who has long been accustomed to the uphill battle for respect in my chosen career. Dealing with race is another area in which comics historians and critics will sometimes bristle when you stray from the “established” narrative. It makes me anxious and second-guess myself at times, but not enough to abandon my interests. My own strategy has been to work towards building or supporting other communities (or “subcultures”) that DO take me and my ideas seriously even when we disagree…. so outside of the university, I helped to put together a blog and now I hang out here at HU and I appreciate the 8 people who read my posts (even if half of those were already my friends to begin with). The angry folks who come out to defend all manner of problematic images on other comment threads may find the claims in my posts too measured and provisional to get as upset as they’d like and when they go off the deep end, I pretty much don’t engage (other than to say, “thanks for stopping by!”) because at a certain point, I’m not going to change their minds. This is the only way I can be sane and still participate online.
I realize, though, that my approach will only get me so far because I’m not really taking any huge risks. I am “being the change that I want to see” and trying to let my work speak for itself – yet that doesn’t always lead to larger, systemic transformation. I’d like to think that some of the initiative I’m taking behind the scenes in the academy through my published work or sitting on boards, etc. will lead to more institutional changes when it comes to comics criticism. But I have no illusions that, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the master’s tools will ever be used to dismantle the master’s house….
I appreciate the risk you took with this post in order to spark a conversation and I hope the comment thread won’t discourage you from continuing to do the work you want on Chute or anyone else. There are people (even those that lurk as I did) who are glad to listen.
For the record, the subject of the second tweet wasn’t Thor but a young woman who was raising money for a trip to Comic-Con. That was the intense Internet issue of that two-hour period.
No one ever writes me about Thor, and this makes me very sad.
I was hoping someone would ask me if I continued to be unclear about it, but no one ever did. I’ll admit that’s a little bit of Internet judo, and apologize for it.
I’d like to say a few more words for anyone who cares to indulge me, though I concede that I have lost perspective. I’m not sure I ever had it. I started this conversation in the only way I knew how: by telling you about my experience. My goal was to spark a conversation, to paraphrase Qiana. It sparked something.
I never meant to express hatred of the 2-4 men I wrote about in the OP, and I never perceived them as expressing hatred of me, or of women. In the same vein, I hope no one here purposefully intended to express hatred of me here in the comments. I extend the benefit of the doubt to even my worst commenters, whose heartfelt explanations of men’s rights will stay with me for a long time.
What I hate is hate itself. And I think there is a hatred of women (and many other demographics) that runs deep in our society for reasons I don’t pretend to understand. All over the world, that hatred is expressed in various ways, with varying stakes. I hate all of it unequivocally.
I asked Noah if he wanted to publish the OP not because I perceive the Hooded Utilitarian as a place that loves to hate (though frankly I don’t know this place all that well yet), but because I perceive it as a platform that shares my belief that hate is worthy of examination. It festers in dark corners because people find it repellent. I find it repellent. But it’s my feeling that someone’s got to look at it, and I do my best to bear witness when I feel like I can and then comment when I think I have something to offer.
For a wide variety of reasons, both of constitution and circumstance, I can’t bear witness to all forms of hatred against women, though I readily admit that most of them are worse than the kind that fester here under the rock of my lousy long essay.
Here’s a fun fact: I don’t know Noah outside of this experience. I trusted him as an editor–and continue to trust him as an editor–to handle a sensitive topic not just because I have read (an admittedly very limited) amount of his writing online, and I perceived him to be intellectually curious. The questions I have seen him ask are not always the questions I myself would ask, or asked in the manner I would choose to ask them, but I think his point of view, insofar as I understand it, is interesting, and I like to see critics doing different things.
(Insofar as I had seen Tom Spurgeon discuss the work of other critics before the OP, which is of course limited and also colored by my own experience, I perceived him to be proprietary with certain topics. Now as far as my tired eyes can tell he has handled this sensitive topic very well and with generosity and even a sense of humor. I would like to apologize for continuing to be a pain in his ass. I hope that CR readers stop writing to him about me and start writing to him about Thor.)
In Noah’s role as an editor, I see him supporting different people doing different things. I trust him as an editor because the first thing he told me when I sent him my OP is that he showed it to his wife, and because I have seen some super smart women writers testify, in this conversation and conversations like these, as to why they feel like they can do their own thing here at HU. Their words resonate with me. But you will note there are still not very many regular women writers here. I think there are even fewer at TCJ.
I have written about identity and feminism at The Hairpin and The Toast, two websites I love. I think identity is extremely complex and always in flux. So is feminism. I struggle with these ideas. But if you want to read a woman who has brilliant things to say about identity and feminism please let me recommend Roxane Gay, if you don’t already know her work. She always comes correct, unlike me. She is a hero, just like Hillary Chute and Lucy Caswell and any number of amazing women doing great things in the world.
For me this whole experience has been a fascinating, if difficult, look at different shades of identity. Tom has made some astute observations about Twitter here. Many others have downplayed Twitter’s importance, which seems nuts. I think it’s a medium that deserves reflection once in a while, and a general sense of care, if not a deep search of the soul for every tweet. I intend to follow Tom’s lead and adjust my perceptions and behavior based on what I have learned here.
My provisional thought on what I have learned is that many of the parties involved in the OP–me and Noah and the people we have brought here (Tom Spurgeon & TCJ staff) perhaps have a lot in common, even though we all approach it differently. I think we all succeed at it in some ways and fail at it in others. I wonder if there’s any way to exploit those similarities, and minimize those failures, to build trust among individuals and communities who seem very suspicious of each other in a way that seems to me to negatively impact the critical milieu surrounding a certain kind of comics, or subculture, or whatever you want to call it. It is my hope that something positive comes from this conversation, though I don’t know what it could be. It may be too much to hope for.
If you have ideas, I hope you’ll share them here or contact me privately. I would never knowingly disrespect anyone’s wish for confidentiality, and I would not (based on Tim Hodler’s feedback!) write a lousy long essay about it without your explicit permission, whatever you choose to say.
I dashed off some ideas earlier today because it felt urgent. I felt like I had little perspective then, and I have none now. I am reaching peak comment here on a Friday night. It is what it is. I’m writing as a person who has had a lot of ugly things in her inbox (as well as a few lovely messages, thanks), and while I continue to believe it’s not personal, it has at times felt that way because I wrote the OP. That’s on me! Thanks a lot for your continued patience. I tried to write about what I perceived as an unwelcoming environment with the hope of making it better, and then respond to this rapidly devolving situation in the comments to the best of my ability.
Again, if anyone has an idea about how something positive could come from this, I welcome your feedback in whatever way works. I also welcome ideas about mitigating the damage this piece may have caused, which I am having a hard time gauging. My own idea for the moment is to add some sort of introduction at the top of the OP, perhaps one that’s written by some other feminist (man or woman). I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m going to try to CLOSE THIS TAB for the weekend and reengage with the good things in my life. I hope you do the same.
OK, I’m going to confess right now that I only read the first hundred or so comments on this thread, and then I started skipping through the rest, but I think there are still, believe it or not, a few points worth making.
I know Tom said he wasn’t Tweeting about that particular article, and I believe him, because I, too, swim in an ocean of internet posts that all start to blend together after a while. But the comment he made is a very common type of comment that one sees in discussions about comics, and plenty of other subjects as well. It’s kind of being a know-it-all: “HOW could you write about this without mentioning that?” I don’t deny it can hurt, but I honestly don’t think it’s sexist. I have gotten plenty of comments like this from women when I write about manga. It’s true that “comics,” if defined in a certain way, is male-dominated, and so that sort of I-know-more-about-this-than-you can appear to be sexist, but that’s sort of an accident of history. As the field becomes more gender-balanced, there will be more snark from the ladies.
The thing is, getting criticized is part of being a published writer. If you show your work to the public, that’s going to happen. A dismissive Tweet can hurt, but you have to learn to brush it off, even if you are young and inexperienced. A supportive editor, or even a few kind words from readers, can go a long way toward helping you form those calluses. Again, I don’t think that’s a male or female thing. Men criticize men too. Dealing with criticism is part of the job.
FWIW, I have experienced way more positive than negative vibes in my years of writing about comics. My editors and readers, male and female, have been overwhelmingly supportive. This is not to say that there isn’t a sexist component to the comics world, but either it’s pretty small or I have been pretty lucky in my choice of colleagues.
Finally, I really have to defend Tom here, because he has been extraordinarily supportive of me as a blogger and journalist. In the early days of MangaBlog he linked to me quite a bit, which was invaluable in helping me build an audience. He still links to me quite often, and he even made me the subject of one of his holiday interviews a few years back. While I don’t think Tom was doing any of it specifically because I am female, I think it’s worth noting that I and many other women have benefited from the exposure he has given us at The Comics Reporter.
And since it seems to have escaped everyone else, I’d like to highlight the fact that Tom hires women writers and *pays* them. As someone who believes that writing is work, and therefore writers should be paid, I think that’s a very important contribution that should not be overlooked.
This is what is needed to encourage more women comics writers: Exposure and money. Kim says in the original post that “the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.” I think it’s pretty clear that Tom is walking the walk.
“I’m done. I’m done commenting on comments by people who don’t comment professionally for a living. Please repost. Now watch this jazz video.”
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MEN TALKING WITH MEN ABOUT WOMEN IN COMICS
Just saw this the other night. What a shitshow. No words, really.
Except: ^ what Betsy Phillips said.
And Kim O’Connor. Thank you for having the guts to say a lot of things that many women in comics experience but feel unsafe in voicing, for exactly the reasons that the (few) women writers describe above. If you read really carefully, it’s all there.
Comics criticism is systematically closed to women because…in a word: misogyny.
One or two examples of individual women critics/academics/historians does not challenge this; because on the one hand: individual examples of a few ‘privileged’ exceptions; while on the other hand: an entire system of oppression; a system in the beginning stages of crumbling, but nonetheless solidly in place.
Kim: PM-ing you grrl.
Noah and Caro, if Tom’s use of the word “modern” was intended to throw shade on anything, it’s modern journalism. Meaning isn’t only generated by individual words but context. When you’re reduced to taking a single word and adding sinister usages to it, that’s a sign you’re being creative. When Tom says “there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article,” a *possible* implication would be that he views modern journalism as tending toward the breezy and ahistorical. But the inference that he is subtly hostile to the progressive gains of the modern era is not supported by anything in his statement, and as you say, Noah, the fact that he is calling for recognition of a woman comics scholar does rather “complicate” that.
On rereading this thread, I think Tom could have cleared up a certain potential for confusion by expanding on his thoughts in a blog post rather than a tweet, but his meaning is clear enough and I see it being subjected to what strike me as aggressive misreadings. It’s not reasonable to conclude that he thinks Kim should have written about Caswell instead of Chute, or that he was motivated by a desire to turn the clock back on the modern era.
As for Kim’s characterization of this debate in her new piece “Let’s Play Make Believe,” I think Brigid Alverson was perfectly justified in offering her opinion and describing her own experience with Tom here–not least because Kim quoted the entirety of her interaction with Tom right here in the form of those tweets. She is also not the only woman to speak up in his defense: if you follow the link to Heidi MacDonald’s blog, you’ll see her describing her own experiences with him and saying, “I always thought as soon as you wrote ANYTHING on the internet, people were going to argue about it!” I’m not sure what to make of the gender breakdown in these comments, but I’d be impressed if more of these women were offering arguments rather than just invoking that disparity and giving Kim the thumbs up. Noah, what was the gender breakdown like for your defenders and detractors on your Salon article against the Bechdel test? Or your OITNB piece? And how do you think that should inform our opinion?