'A Lack of Self-Awareness' -- *Guy in WS Gets Reviewed*
Reviews for my second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, continue to come in at a slow trickle. I missed this one when it first came out in January, and discovered it while doing a vanity search on Google just the other day.
Margaret Adelle provided a review in both video and written (Goodreads) form.
It's not exactly a round of applause for the book.
I tend to think it is bad form for an author or other artist to react or respond to negative reviews, because it tends to come across as resentment that anyone would be anything other than impressed with the piece and makes one look thin-skinned and unable to tolerate criticism. I'm going to risk it this time because Margaret Adelle brings up some salient points, even if I don't agree with them all fully.
There's one central aspect of Margaret Adelle's commentary that I want to react to in particular: she sees me, or at least the "me" represented as Derek in my book, as intruding into women's space, and doing so rather arrogantly and cluelessly.
There exists an attitude: that, hey, if I identify as a woman or a female or as femme or girl or whatever, I therefore get to go into any place that is earmarked and designated for them and their use. Or, rather, us and OUR use. That if that's my identity, it would be blatant bigotry for anyone to question my presence and participation there.
Well, sometimes that is arrogant. I know many of my trans sisters and brothers will be appalled to hear me say so, but I do say so. It is sometimes even true even if your marginalization or oppression is worse than what cisgender women face. (Or you think it is). Not that your -- or my -- presence in such spaces is always inappropriate, just that oversimplified "answered it for all situations and for all time so I don't need to even think about it" types of answers are indeed arrogant. In the board game Monopoly, you can acquire a Get Out of Jail Free card, but when it comes to marginalization and intersectional oppression nobody gets a "Gee I'm Oppressed So I'm Automatically On the Right Side" card.
Margaret Adelle finds me (or, rather, the me that I was in 1985) arrogant in assuming that because I was marginalized as a sissy femme, I have every right to use academic women's studies as a springboard for trying to make a social movement for sissy femmes like me come into existence. That I was entitled to go into those classrooms and start speaking as an authority. That I was entitled to get credentials in women's studies and start speaking from within feminism itself as a self-designated spokesperson (spokes-sissy?) for these concerns.
As she points out, the story arc concludes with me realizing that I can't. That feminism is not my movement, and that I need to find a different way to have a voice in society. But she has limited patience with my process of getting there.
Is there not a middle ground for acknowledging that as a person with no social place at all to go, I had some latitude for taking my issues into the spaces where I took them, while also seeing that at least in some cases I was intruding into spaces that were not where I belonged?
Among the other concerns that are a part of the axe I brought to grind are matters of courting and flirting and pursuing sexual relationships. Here, too, I was approaching these matters as a femme, evaluating my thoughts and deeds as if I were a girl like any other girl in my priorities and needs, but in the passages where I've written of such things -- the trajectory of my attempts to have a girlfriend in my life -- this critique evaluates me as a man who expresses an indignant sense of entitlement, a man who clearly thinks intimacy ought to be coming my way because I'm oh so feminist and sensitive and stuff. Creepy.
Some similar comments were elicited by some other reviewers when they were reviewing my first book, GenderQueer, as exemplified by the January 2021 panel discussion hosted at Kramer's Bookstore.
The conceptual space in which the romantic interests and behaviors of girls might be assessed by others isn't exactly the same kind of "women's space" that is entailed by a classroom or an activist movement, but undeniably I was doing my best to lay claim to it, asking that my behaviors and priorities be evaluated in the same way that those of a female person of the same age would be looked at, but this, too, is perceived by some as arrogant: those same behaviors are turned and examined instead as the behaviors of a male person who protests that since he is such a sensitive feminist kind of fellow, he is owed some romantic outcomes that aren't happening, and he's all bitter about it, and it's not a good look.
At least some of that is a fair cop. I am indeed headstrong, and I have spent most of my life focused on my stuff, defining it as a social cause, but undeniably it is all about me. That is part of what the book's about: that being marginalized doesn't give a person (in this case, me) carte blanche.
I dared to think of myself as one of the girls, and to evaluate my own self accordingly. Some of the outcome of that may have been intrusive and arrogant, but I think on balance it was liberating for me at a no-more-than-reasonable cost to the rest of society.
The burden is on me to make the case for it, of course.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir.Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
Margaret Adelle provided a review in both video and written (Goodreads) form.
It's not exactly a round of applause for the book.
I tend to think it is bad form for an author or other artist to react or respond to negative reviews, because it tends to come across as resentment that anyone would be anything other than impressed with the piece and makes one look thin-skinned and unable to tolerate criticism. I'm going to risk it this time because Margaret Adelle brings up some salient points, even if I don't agree with them all fully.
There's one central aspect of Margaret Adelle's commentary that I want to react to in particular: she sees me, or at least the "me" represented as Derek in my book, as intruding into women's space, and doing so rather arrogantly and cluelessly.
There exists an attitude: that, hey, if I identify as a woman or a female or as femme or girl or whatever, I therefore get to go into any place that is earmarked and designated for them and their use. Or, rather, us and OUR use. That if that's my identity, it would be blatant bigotry for anyone to question my presence and participation there.
Well, sometimes that is arrogant. I know many of my trans sisters and brothers will be appalled to hear me say so, but I do say so. It is sometimes even true even if your marginalization or oppression is worse than what cisgender women face. (Or you think it is). Not that your -- or my -- presence in such spaces is always inappropriate, just that oversimplified "answered it for all situations and for all time so I don't need to even think about it" types of answers are indeed arrogant. In the board game Monopoly, you can acquire a Get Out of Jail Free card, but when it comes to marginalization and intersectional oppression nobody gets a "Gee I'm Oppressed So I'm Automatically On the Right Side" card.
Margaret Adelle finds me (or, rather, the me that I was in 1985) arrogant in assuming that because I was marginalized as a sissy femme, I have every right to use academic women's studies as a springboard for trying to make a social movement for sissy femmes like me come into existence. That I was entitled to go into those classrooms and start speaking as an authority. That I was entitled to get credentials in women's studies and start speaking from within feminism itself as a self-designated spokesperson (spokes-sissy?) for these concerns.
As she points out, the story arc concludes with me realizing that I can't. That feminism is not my movement, and that I need to find a different way to have a voice in society. But she has limited patience with my process of getting there.
Is there not a middle ground for acknowledging that as a person with no social place at all to go, I had some latitude for taking my issues into the spaces where I took them, while also seeing that at least in some cases I was intruding into spaces that were not where I belonged?
Among the other concerns that are a part of the axe I brought to grind are matters of courting and flirting and pursuing sexual relationships. Here, too, I was approaching these matters as a femme, evaluating my thoughts and deeds as if I were a girl like any other girl in my priorities and needs, but in the passages where I've written of such things -- the trajectory of my attempts to have a girlfriend in my life -- this critique evaluates me as a man who expresses an indignant sense of entitlement, a man who clearly thinks intimacy ought to be coming my way because I'm oh so feminist and sensitive and stuff. Creepy.
Some similar comments were elicited by some other reviewers when they were reviewing my first book, GenderQueer, as exemplified by the January 2021 panel discussion hosted at Kramer's Bookstore.
The conceptual space in which the romantic interests and behaviors of girls might be assessed by others isn't exactly the same kind of "women's space" that is entailed by a classroom or an activist movement, but undeniably I was doing my best to lay claim to it, asking that my behaviors and priorities be evaluated in the same way that those of a female person of the same age would be looked at, but this, too, is perceived by some as arrogant: those same behaviors are turned and examined instead as the behaviors of a male person who protests that since he is such a sensitive feminist kind of fellow, he is owed some romantic outcomes that aren't happening, and he's all bitter about it, and it's not a good look.
At least some of that is a fair cop. I am indeed headstrong, and I have spent most of my life focused on my stuff, defining it as a social cause, but undeniably it is all about me. That is part of what the book's about: that being marginalized doesn't give a person (in this case, me) carte blanche.
I dared to think of myself as one of the girls, and to evaluate my own self accordingly. Some of the outcome of that may have been intrusive and arrogant, but I think on balance it was liberating for me at a no-more-than-reasonable cost to the rest of society.
The burden is on me to make the case for it, of course.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My third book is deep in second draft, and I'm seeking more beta readers for feedback. It is provisionally titled Within the Box and is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir.Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts