Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

        Wordslut is such a fun book. Despite this being my first exposure to Amanda Montell, I can’t help but feel that her voice shines beautifully throughout the work. Her writing is lively, conversational, both-serious-and-not. There’s a real levity to her analysis that makes the book a truly entertaining read. It probably helps that she herself reads the audiobook and is really able to sell the tone.

At a glance, a number of the chapters come across as being silly. Consider, for example, the first chapter: “Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)”. Another chapter is “Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)” and another is called “Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female”. While these chapter titles give the impression of a crass-for-fun approach, there’s something more powerful happening throughout Wordslut.

The book is a sociolinguistic exploration of sex and gender. It’s told in such an approachable, personal way that it is a beautiful entry point for people thinking about language or gender studies. It’s corrective without being accusatory. It’s informative without being pedantic. One example is when Montell breaks down the class and race-based use of “y’all” and critiques the haters of this second person plural that makes language more clear than saying “you” to multiple people or “you guys” to people that don’t all identify as boys and men.

The book touches on a number of ideas around the misogyny embedded in language. Some of the ground has been covered before (for instance, doing a statistical analysis of how many derogatory words there are for women as opposed to men), but it is always done with a fresh set of eyes and empathy for the language users most often criticized (i.e. women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks).

To give a few examples, Montell discusses differences in communication between socialized women and men. She discusses phenomena like hedging the conversation, affirming comments, and so on, among women. Even the phrase “like,” disproportionately (and erroneously) attributed to valley girls, serves a valuable linguistic function. Montell even goes into detail on why “the gay voice” is a phenomenon. The book is progressive and, at every turn, Montell makes a case against prescriptive linguistics and for embracing the linguistic shifts that happen naturally as the English language develops.

A number of the specifics are fascinating, but it’s a little beyond my capacity to summarize all of the specific details. All I can really do is encourage you to read the book—and better yet, listen to the audiobook so that you can hear all the fun percussive curses that come from Montell’s mouth.

Happy reading!

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

  Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein exists within a network of similar texts, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The text operates in conversation with other books like Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin, The Digital Closet by Alexander Monea, Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. Each of the texts deals with the way that technology impacts our relationship to sex, gender, race, and politics. Moreover, Data Feminism (like Automating Inequality) focuses on how data is used to manipulate real-world, tangible politics.

The unfortunate thing for D’Ignazio and Klein is that they are late to my reading party; I’ve already read several related books prior to their contribution to the discourse. As a result, a lot of the information presented here isn’t exactly new or revolutionary. Some of the examples are even pulled from texts I’ve already read and so it left me feeling a little bit lukewarm.

I thought some of the language they added into the conversation was valuable. First was the idea of “privilege hazard”---essentially that one’s entitlement in society creates dangers for others, often in the form of blind spots when collecting and presenting data. That term seems useful to me for conceptualizing oppression without it necessarily assigning a particular blame and without assigning a foregone conclusion. It’s a hazard—something to consider, but also something that can be avoided or minimized. Also, something that is a hazard to us even when it is unintended. On the cheekier side, D’Ignazio and Klein use the term Big Dick Data to describe a masculinized approach to data, and I thought that was an amusing characterization.

Another layer of the book I found compelling was their discussion of data visualization and the debates which surround it. Common opinion is to present data as being value-neutral and being presented in as clear and concise a manner as possible, without even icons to suggest emotion. However, as we know, data is never neutral. Even the decision of what to include is rooted in values. So, D’Ignazio and Klein discuss the idea of data sensationalism. They describe some interesting projects with how data gets presented. For example, they describe a death-by-gun-violence map blocking out entire sections of neighbourhoods or showing a tally of “stolen years” from children that have died by gun violence. They also talk about a presentation where people read the alphabetized names of all the artists in (if I remember correctly) the MET? The Smithsonian? MOMA? Anyway, they read the names out and it becomes a wave of Marks, Jasons, Jameses, Andrews, and so forth. It cascades like a wave and then every once in a while, there is a joyful insertion of a woman’s name and the presenters change their demeanour for that brief instant. It’s a way of presenting data in such a way that the implications are immediately obvious. Exploring those creative means of presenting data to give a particular point of view were especially interesting.

In any case, the book is pretty good, if not really ‘new for me’. If you’re exploring the discourse for the first time, it would be well worth it to start here.

Happy reading!

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

I was going to start this review with an anecdote about my own moral outrage towards a once-inspirational artist. I typed a few sentences about a particular band, then erased them. I wrote and cut out a part about some poet that disappointed me. I considered a particular actor and then backspacedbackspacedbackspaced. Truth is, if I continued in that vein, we’d shortly have a laundry list of abusers, misogynists, and predators and Claire Dederer’s fantastic book would have been unjustly drowned out by my own ranting.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma explores a question that is increasingly critical in our contemporary discourse: what do we do with the art of monstrous men (and women)? I am completely confident that everyone reading this review (all four of you) has had an experience where learning about an artist’s biography has tainted your view of the work and you’ve had to decide: do you keep watching? Do you re-read that classic? Do you write a scathing review? What is our capacity for blindspots?

I really admire the tact and nuance that Claire Dederer brought to this work. In the opening of the book, she admits that she began her research by looking to experts to help dictate whether or not we should still watch the movies of, in her examples, Roman Polanski or Woody Allen. I admit that I turned to this book from a similar impulse. I wanted to know how to respond to the horrors of contemporary society and their relationship with art.

Dederer does not profess to be an expert (though I’d argue she is), but there are three main facets of the argument that I find particularly useful in considerations of flawed art. She does not separate the art from the artist, necessarily, but she does separate ethics from emotion. One of the key pillars of her argument is that when we are outraged at an artist, we experience an emotional response rather than an ethical one. It’s a tricky argument to make, but I find it plausible, and it does establish the capacity to discuss “cancel culture” in a different way.

A second key pillar of the argument is that artists’ work is stained by their biography, which is an involuntary and amorphous experience. Dederer’s work really resonates with me because she has such a strong grasp of literary theory, and she explicitly references the New Critics, who famously wanted to bracket artworks from their creators. Instead, the focus is on the internal logic of the artwork and whether the form and content function together and provide everything we need in order to appreciate it. Dederer exposes the limitations of New Criticism with the discussion of the Stain. Borrowing from Stephen Fry’s response to Richard Wagner, Dederer discusses The Stain of an author’s biography leaves on their work and affects our understanding of it. It’s like a tapestry with a stain that you can’t ignore—but you can try to appreciate the other parts.

I can hear Dederer’s critics rejecting the separation of the art and the artist. Dederer, though, offers two brilliant takes to dismantle that argument. For the first, she talks about how her own experience of art is already hard-won and how she refuses to let beauty be taken away from her: “My own ability to experience pleasure, specifically pleasure arising from consuming art, was imperilled all the time — by depression, by jadedness, by distraction. And now I was finding I must also take into account biography: an artist’s biography as a disruptor of my own pleasure.” There’s a certain kind of privilege in being able to simply let go of great art with a morally objectionable creator. The second piece that I find really compelling is her discussion of Mark Fisher. She refers to Postcapitalist Desire and Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher discusses the idea of recycling as a bit of a scam. Corporations who produce massive amounts of waste put the responsibility on individuals to recycle rather than changing their own practices or taking on the financial burden. Dederer draws the parallel with “cancel culture.” We can opt to not listen to a certain musician, we can choose not to stream a TV show, but ultimately that does not change the practices that allow rampant misogyny and abuse. The way she phrases the argument is perfect, but in my own words I would say that consumerism puts us into a position of divisiveness and supposedly ethical consumerism (no such thing) won’t get us out of this mess.

So in that respect, there are a lot of arguments that Dederer makes throughout Monsters that I find persuasive. Her reading of texts is stunning, as well. There’s a whole chapter about Nabokov that I find offers another brilliant reading of Lolita (showing once again how it is such a rich text!). You’ll be pleased to know that Nabokov, for all we can tell, is not a monster in real life—only in fiction. Dederer also gives a rich reading of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen films that add to an appreciation of their beauty. There are readings of Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, and Raymond Carver—but I have less experience with their work, so it wasn’t as resonant. 

More than that, Dederer is funny. Her prose is simply fantastic, with stunning turns of phrase—especially when she is insulting people. Some of the phrases that she applies to monsters are so hilariously scathing that I would never want to be on her bad side. She reviews The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. Incidentally, The Garden of Eden is, in my opinion, an underappreciated novel. Hemingway doesn’t do much for me, but I have a good memory of The Garden of Eden, which I learned was originally over 1000 pages and later abridged to about three hundred by an editor. But Dederer’s review is simply fantastic: “I’m here to say I’ve read it and it seems to be 90% about people getting haircuts.” She’s not wrong. She continues to discuss about the “ostensibly frivolous preoccupation with appearances” but how it’s a preoccupation that is worth considering in terms of gender. The central character is being feminized by his wife Catherine and I think there’s something interesting there, given Hemingway’s reputation as a man’s man. It’s worth considering how this text offers a glimpse into Hemingway from a different angle.

Throughout Monsters, there is a discussion of what constitutes a genius and how men are able to engage in their craft despite (because of?) their monstrosity. Dederer makes a comparison between men and women in terms of monstrosity, with a woman’s prime monstrosity being abandoning or not having children. There’s an extensive discussion of how children hinder or alter genius, which is interesting, but drifts a little farther away from the moral quandary of the audience.

I appreciate, also, the tenderness of Dederer’s approach to Raymond Carver and the problem of redemption. We want to admire beauty, of course, but the capacity for forgiveness (through the recognition of the monstrousness in all of us) takes centre stage towards the end of the book. I really admire the humanizing principle of Monsters and allows it to serve as a wonderful testament to the idea of being hard on systems but soft on people.

There’s a fascinating section of the book that deals with antisemitism. Dederer documents Winifred Wagner in an interview, commenting on politics and art. Dederer notes that “to [Winifred Wagner’s] mind, things were not only better but realer in the old days when we didn’t pretend politics were so important, what she calls ‘the fuss.’” I think the anecdote offers some good insight into what is happening currently. Dederer explains how Wagner’s daughter-in-law “presents her antisemitism as a kind of realness” and how she and Hitler “used to laugh about all the fuss.” Winifred notes that she does not care about politics, she complains about the intellectualization and politicization of art, and she sincerely believes the racist things she says are true. Dederer notes that “she believes she is only saying what’s true and those who don’t say it don’t know it, or are simply not admitting the truth.” In Dederer’s words: “Like a good fascist, she believes she and her kind are the ones who are free of politics—free of ‘fuss’ [...] There is no regret, no sorrow, no compassion, no understanding: there is only this devastating impassivity interrupted by mischievous, chilling smiles.” In all of this, I see a funhouse mirror of Alex Jones, Q-Anon supporters, Trump supporters, and other conspiracy theorists. These people that claim that there are truths that you just don’t know about—but of course, this isn’t political. Reality isn’t political (or so they say).

To the credit of the interviewer, he interrupts Winifred Wagner to offer the quotation from Walter Benjamin: “Thus, fascism aestheticizes politics, and communism answers with the politicizing of art.” It’s a great way to interrupt this discourse that aims to suggest art as an apolitical haven.

When I consider the implications for Dederer’s argument, I find myself once again enmeshed in the discussion of whether it’s worth reading / watching / listening to artists that have done harm. I still have the same questions: is it different if the artist is alive? Is it different if I don’t pay for it? As much as Dederer exposes how we can’t simply bracket all biography, I do think there is a difference between consuming art that is created by someone awful but is beautiful versus art that is created by someone awful and also shows that awfulness. Comedy might be a good example here—a transphobic person in real life gets on stage and tells a transphobic joke—the content itself is reprehensible.

Dederer offers an amusing tone here in discussing Woody Allen’s film Manhattan, in which a middle-aged man dates [I use this word here, but manipulates and abuses is probably a better descriptor] a highschooler. “The really astonishing thing about this scene,” Dederer writes, “is its nonchalance: nbd I’m fuckin’ a highschooler.” She comments on the way that Allen as a filmmaker is “fascinated with moral shading except when it comes to this particular issue: the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls. In the face of this particular issue, one of our greatest observers of contemporary ethics [...] suddenly becomes a dummy. [...] One senses Allen performing a kind of artistic grooming of the audience or maybe even of himself. Just keep saying it’s okay until somehow, miraculously, it becomes okay.” This would be a clear instance where the film itself is promoting a message that is itself morally reprehensible: the author’s biography is immaterial.

I highly recommend this book. To me, it’s the definitive book on this highly contemporaneous and fraught issue. Dederer is a model of insightful reading, thinking, and writing. Her style is precise, entertaining, and clear. I love how she incorporates highly theoretical influences into a practical context and offers personal anecdotes that are as intimate as they are relatable. It’s some really excellent work that is well-worth exploring, even when—maybe especially because—the issues of misogyny, abuse, sexual assault, and violence remain so pervasive in our media industry that it seems inescapable. Until the day that some non-problematic AI gets invented and we have no use for authors anymore, we should probably consider for ourselves how to best confront this issue of harmful artists and the beauty they nonetheless create.

Happy reading. May it be forever unfraught.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

    Let’s start this new year in the hopes that things will not fall apart. Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel is a classic of Nigerian literature that offers a unique, if problematized, examination of an Ibo village. The novel seems to focus, loosely, on Okonkwo, a man of significant esteem in the village who struggles with the changing times. Indeed, the opening epigraph and title of the novel are from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” in which “the centre cannot hold.”

    The novel is thematically consistent unto itself with respect to considerations of masculinity, fatherhood, and so on. Okonkwo, for instance, is a patriarchal figure who enacts violence against women and children who do not fulfil their roles in relation to him.There are a number of moments where Okonkwo proclaims his commitment to a masculine role and eschews “effeminate” men, who might be effeminate for any number of things, including enjoying hearing stories and being Christian. In Ibo, they are referred to as “efulefu”--a worthless man like a sheath without a knife. To modern and North American sensibilities, seeing the central character align so directly with the patriarchy is uncomfortable—and yet I find my allegiances for characters in the book torn.

    The reason for my difficulty is that about halfway through the book white colonizers come and begin to take over Nigerian villages through violence while converting the inhabitants to Christianity. I, of course, tend to side against colonizers (for obvious reasons). And yet here, it’s hard to reconcile because in this case the colonizers’ way of life seems more humane than some of the customs of the Ibo people. For instance, when twins are born in Ibo villages superstition prompts their parents to disposed of them—a practice the Church condemns. In turn, I’m placed in a no-win situation.

    The destructive customs surrounding masculinity and myth-making run throughout the text. At first glance, the colonized and the colonizers are far apart, ideologically. However, upon closer inspection, more parallels seem to emerge. While Okwonko is obsessed with raising his children to follow their father’s customs, the Christians also encourage their figurative children to follow their Father’s customs. Okwonko himself has a God-like moment where his adoptive son (a son not born to him—sound familiar?) is sentenced to death to appease a higher power. Okwonko is advised by The Oracle not to have a hand in his murder, and yet he cannot show mercy. When his adoptive son has been stabbed, he runs to his father, and Okwonko delivers the killing blow for fear of being seen as unmasculine for having sympathy. Religious and earthly fatherhood run concurrently and the scene is quite tragic and one of the most moving sequences in the story.

    The story itself is generally told in a more mythic register. There is a directness to the narration that outlines the experiences of the characters in a simply-stated style that evokes the “once-upon-a-time-s” of fairy tales. The motif is reinforced as characters tell one another the myths and aphorisms of the land that govern their customs. My particular favourite was the story one character recounts about a turtle who gets a bunch of birds to carry him to a feast. He invents a custom that everyone takes on new names and so he chooses the name “All of you” so that when the feast is presented to “All of you” he gets to help himself. In an act of revenge, the birds tell his wife that the turtle requested all the hard objects in the house placed outside (rather than the soft ones he actually requested) and then the birds drop him onto the hard materials below. Those types of little stories are a nice addition to the characters that read as types throughout the text. 

    Culturally, I’m not sure how accurate the novel aims to be. The narrator describes some of the customs. I think it would be ill-advised to accept all fiction as a kind of ethnographic study, but I did find the ideas Achebe brought up to be compelling and believable enough that it feels like these are the authentic Ibo people. One myth is that of the ogbanje; an obanje is a changeling child who continues a cycle of dying, returning to his mother to be born again, and then dying again. In our minds, it would be most logical to consider the causes of miscarriages or infant mortality, but for the Ibo people they have elaborate rituals of having medicine men forcing the obanje to lead them to an iyi-uwa, a special stone that forms the link between the obanje and the spirit world. The stone must be destroyed in order for future children to not die. I found those rituals compelling and strange, but imbued with that mythic quality that feels true. As one character says of a myth in the story, “There is no story that is not true” (141) and so these little vignettes ring with a sincerity which I quite appreciated.

    It is one of these cultural norms that ultimately force Okwonko to leave his village. Following the death of an elderly man, Okwonko says something to the effect of, “If anyone caused his death I want them to be punished forever” and by accident the deceased man’s son is shot and killed. The “murder” falls on Okwonko and he is exiled to his mother’s village for seven years. That shift is a pretty interesting one.

    In fact, it isn’t really until the second act, halfway through the novel, that the plot starts to feel cohesive. The opening feels like a series of vignettes that largely orbit around Okwonko, though he may not be driving the action of the story. In fact, the story generally does not follow a satisfactory narrative structure. The conflict does not escalate in increments; instead, a series of scenes take place. Perhaps that’s why the shift into the second act feels more satisfying: an event has a direct cause on another event of greater significance.

    To offer a charitable reading of the novel, Okwonko’s general insignificance to the overall plot is perfectly aligned with his own anxieties of fading away into insignificance as Christianity takes over as the authority of the village. Okwonko’s own lack of centrality to the plot fits in exactly with the idea that “things fall apart” without a centre. The back half of the novel, where Okwonko is removed from his environment feels more focused and engaging, in part because this is where there is a more obvious problem: colonization. Seeing the effects of colonization is the troubling part of the plot that is also most thought provoking. For instance, Okwonko’s son decides to convert to Christianity. Political moments are best presented in novels alongside personal conflicts, and this is where Things Fall Apart shines. Okwonko disowns his son, threatens to haunt his other children if they follow Christianity, and so on. The blend of personal-political is well-achieved in that respect—but again, remember how problematic holding on to the ‘old ways’ of the Ibo villages may be. Is there an endorsement either way? It’s hard to know for sure.

    The ending of the book is worth some comment, and I’ll spoil the final moments in this paragraph. In the final chapters, the conflict between the Christians and the more traditional Ibo people escalates. A Christian messenger arrives to, basically, assert their power and Okwonko murders the messenger. Knowing that consequences are coming, Okwonko commits suicide by hanging. It’s an interesting moment in several respects: 1) It’s clear that Okwonko is increasingly alone in his beliefs and 2) suicide is seen as ‘feminine’ and for a hypermasculine character who routinely derides womanly behaviour to clearly betray his own values brings him closer, ironically, to the Ibo people who have abandoned his way of seeing things. It recalls to me the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, in which an oppressed group tries to communicate their discontent via suicide. I’m always interested in the question of how oppressed groups can communicate with dominant groups on their own terms while still being understood. Okwonko’s death is a product of a double-bind. He’s resisting the dominant culture through his suicide, but at the same time his suicide is coded differently for his class—in his mind it seems to be either a recoding of the feminine as masculine resistance OR a resignation to his society’s changing mores. Of course, with something like suicide the intent can never be defended, and so the double-bind of the ending feels all the more constricting (perhaps a double-bind that the audience experiences all the more intensely for seeing the flaws in both the colonizer and the colonized and feeling compelled / repelled simultaneously).

    Ultimately Things Fall Apart is worth reading as a classic of Nigerian literature that can bring you into several important and timely conversations. As a novel, I feel like it’s reasonably accomplished, if a bit unfocused and problematic in its focalization on such a misogynistic central character. Nonetheless, it provokes thought and discourse and has had a longevity that extends beyond the immediate.

    Here’s hoping for a new year of wonderful reads. Happy reading!