the male (eval)
A couple days ago I saw this article: The Male Glance. It's pretty good. You should probably read it. I recommend reading all of it, and reading it slowly. Try to really hear what is being described. Do not rush to summarize and dismiss. It already condenses quite a lot. Discourse I've heard from women over the years, about gender-coding of work, evaluation, performance, unequal standards, misreadings, circumscription, dismissal.
Generations of forgetting to zoom into female experience aren’t easily shrugged off, however noble our intentions, and the upshot is that we still don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say. We imagine them as small and careful, or petty and domestic, or vain, or sassy, or confessional. [...] But we don’t expect them to be experimental, and we don’t expect them to be great.
I work in the software business, so of course my familiarity with this glance, this evaluation of women's texts, is of a different sort of texts: programs, libraries, languages, proofs, papers, references. Yet it is as omnipresent in the critical discussion of these works as in literature.
“I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel,”
[...]
“The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”
The evaluation is always dismissive, searching for the flaw that proves the assumption: the woman's work is not serious. Not really useful, not really hard, not representative of progress. No greatness. Derivative or frivolous or pedestrian. Or of a genre that's categorically belittled: operations, testing, front-end, user-facing, high-level, aesthetic, pedagogical, "only scripting" .. the list goes on.
But that's not solely, or even principally, what the article is about. It's about .. well, makeup. About a particular aesthetic-labor dimension to (some) women's works that the author situates as "female chivalry". Something men I've known and worked with often struggle to make sense of or articulate -- especially in any way other than with hostility -- when talking to women about their experience.
This is female chivalry. It consists in allowing us to think we’re spontaneously noticing that which has been explicitly put there for us to notice. Like all chivalry, it has pernicious consequences when it goes unappreciated or unobserved.
[...]
If traditional male chivalry involves loud displays of care like ostentatious door-opening, the entire point of female chivalry is that it’s functionally invisible. We don’t actually realize we’ve been aesthetically tended to and philosophically cosseted into considering ourselves better readers of surface and depth than we really are. As with any creature spoiled into thinking too well of itself, this breeds a meanness of spirit.
Further, it's about the metacircular artifice of performing such labor for an evaluator you know to be principally interested in unmasking and dismissing you; and thus your ability to deliver that unmasking experience itself, by intent. It's about how one caught in this vertiginous nightmare must continuously decide which level of narrative about your identity -- and work -- to engage with and operate at.
If we were less busy celebrating our perfect vision, we might notice that under the mask we spotted there may lurk a rather interesting and even intentional subjectivity which-in addition to the usual universal human things we all share-has been trained from birth to constantly consider and craft its own performance from a third-person perspective. In other words, women-in addition to being faces whose deceptions we seek to expose, because they are that too-are walking around with the usual amount of self-awareness and a few meta layers to boot. There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos.
It is also about blindness: the truth-obscuring tower of performance and self-representation women find themselves struggling to be seen through, and struggling to perceive themselves and their own work through. And about maybe just giving up and checking out of the game altogether.
It also demonstrates the other feature of readerly experience I’m trying to describe: Namely, the ongoing and exhausting project of having to experience narrative through two sets of eyes. Or three. The further you move away from white masculinity, the more points of view you have to juggle. Have you ever played that icebreaker game where you’re in a room and the first person has to say their name, then the next person has to say the first person’s name and then their own? The last person in the circle gets the shaft: They have to name every single person in the room before they get to say their own name. That’s the marginalized viewer’s cognitive burden in a nutshell.
When I hear women in my business talking about wanting to leave it, or set up their own women-only companies, or projects, or at least back-channels and workspaces, it's often framed in terms of exhaustion with such a burden, with just wanting to be able to focus on the work and feeling like there's a never-ending game of perception-management and self-evaluation bleeding their time and energy most days.
Anyway the article resonated with me -- totally apart from literature and art, which I don't especially consider software to be -- and I think it's worth a read, maybe to resonate with your own field, whatever it is. It ends on a somewhat positive note, making a request to readers.
Unlearning the male glance means recognizing that even as we’ve dismissed non-male artistic intentionality as improbable, we’ve remained endlessly receptive to the slightest sign of male genius. [...] Our starting assumption, to correct for our smug inattention throughout history, ought to be that there’s likely quite a bit more to the female text than we initially see.
I think this is a helpful reminder when evaluating someone's work, if they're underrepresented in a field or their work is conventionally subject to categorical diminution: assume there's more to it than your immediate reflex classification grants. Pause and look a bit. Pay attention to the works you find yourself lazily inclined to overlook.
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/258516.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Generations of forgetting to zoom into female experience aren’t easily shrugged off, however noble our intentions, and the upshot is that we still don’t expect female texts to have universal things to say. We imagine them as small and careful, or petty and domestic, or vain, or sassy, or confessional. [...] But we don’t expect them to be experimental, and we don’t expect them to be great.
I work in the software business, so of course my familiarity with this glance, this evaluation of women's texts, is of a different sort of texts: programs, libraries, languages, proofs, papers, references. Yet it is as omnipresent in the critical discussion of these works as in literature.
“I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel,”
[...]
“The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.”
The evaluation is always dismissive, searching for the flaw that proves the assumption: the woman's work is not serious. Not really useful, not really hard, not representative of progress. No greatness. Derivative or frivolous or pedestrian. Or of a genre that's categorically belittled: operations, testing, front-end, user-facing, high-level, aesthetic, pedagogical, "only scripting" .. the list goes on.
But that's not solely, or even principally, what the article is about. It's about .. well, makeup. About a particular aesthetic-labor dimension to (some) women's works that the author situates as "female chivalry". Something men I've known and worked with often struggle to make sense of or articulate -- especially in any way other than with hostility -- when talking to women about their experience.
This is female chivalry. It consists in allowing us to think we’re spontaneously noticing that which has been explicitly put there for us to notice. Like all chivalry, it has pernicious consequences when it goes unappreciated or unobserved.
[...]
If traditional male chivalry involves loud displays of care like ostentatious door-opening, the entire point of female chivalry is that it’s functionally invisible. We don’t actually realize we’ve been aesthetically tended to and philosophically cosseted into considering ourselves better readers of surface and depth than we really are. As with any creature spoiled into thinking too well of itself, this breeds a meanness of spirit.
Further, it's about the metacircular artifice of performing such labor for an evaluator you know to be principally interested in unmasking and dismissing you; and thus your ability to deliver that unmasking experience itself, by intent. It's about how one caught in this vertiginous nightmare must continuously decide which level of narrative about your identity -- and work -- to engage with and operate at.
If we were less busy celebrating our perfect vision, we might notice that under the mask we spotted there may lurk a rather interesting and even intentional subjectivity which-in addition to the usual universal human things we all share-has been trained from birth to constantly consider and craft its own performance from a third-person perspective. In other words, women-in addition to being faces whose deceptions we seek to expose, because they are that too-are walking around with the usual amount of self-awareness and a few meta layers to boot. There’s better performance art in almost any woman than there is in a thousand James Francos.
It is also about blindness: the truth-obscuring tower of performance and self-representation women find themselves struggling to be seen through, and struggling to perceive themselves and their own work through. And about maybe just giving up and checking out of the game altogether.
It also demonstrates the other feature of readerly experience I’m trying to describe: Namely, the ongoing and exhausting project of having to experience narrative through two sets of eyes. Or three. The further you move away from white masculinity, the more points of view you have to juggle. Have you ever played that icebreaker game where you’re in a room and the first person has to say their name, then the next person has to say the first person’s name and then their own? The last person in the circle gets the shaft: They have to name every single person in the room before they get to say their own name. That’s the marginalized viewer’s cognitive burden in a nutshell.
When I hear women in my business talking about wanting to leave it, or set up their own women-only companies, or projects, or at least back-channels and workspaces, it's often framed in terms of exhaustion with such a burden, with just wanting to be able to focus on the work and feeling like there's a never-ending game of perception-management and self-evaluation bleeding their time and energy most days.
Anyway the article resonated with me -- totally apart from literature and art, which I don't especially consider software to be -- and I think it's worth a read, maybe to resonate with your own field, whatever it is. It ends on a somewhat positive note, making a request to readers.
Unlearning the male glance means recognizing that even as we’ve dismissed non-male artistic intentionality as improbable, we’ve remained endlessly receptive to the slightest sign of male genius. [...] Our starting assumption, to correct for our smug inattention throughout history, ought to be that there’s likely quite a bit more to the female text than we initially see.
I think this is a helpful reminder when evaluating someone's work, if they're underrepresented in a field or their work is conventionally subject to categorical diminution: assume there's more to it than your immediate reflex classification grants. Pause and look a bit. Pay attention to the works you find yourself lazily inclined to overlook.
This entry was originally posted at https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/258516.html. Please comment there using OpenID.