File spoon-archives/modernism.archive/modernism_2003/modernism.0305, message 30


Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 09:49:53 -0500 (CDT)
From: Kathleen Ricker <kricker-AT-ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: Response to Re: Response to Re: Response to Re: modernism and the middlebrow




On Tue, 6 May 2003, John V. Knapp wrote:

> Hence to argue, as do some feminist critics, that human biology makes NO
> difference in explaining sensibility and that socialization (environmental
> explanations) accounts for ALL meaningful variations is simply not
> corroborated by evidence from other disciplines (evolutionary
> biology/psychology, genetics, etc).  The complex interactive MIX of
> environment and biology is what drives most thinking these days -- except
> in what I have called "literary psychology" which is still, I have argued,
> dominated by Freud, Lacan, Gilligan, etc.  A very good resource from the
> discipline of human learning (speaking of such complexity) is Barbara
> Rogoff's new book, *The Cultural Nature of Human Development* (2003).

I'll be on the lookout for that.  Thanks for the title.

I never took literary psychology seriously--always seemed kind of ad hoc
to me.

> Your assumption that "[t]he male is still seen as the norm by which
> everything else is measured" might have been a truism in the 1970s, but is
> hardly the case these days.  I enjoy tweeking my feminist colleagues and
> family when they keep using cliches from twenty-five years ago to explain
> what is hardly the case anymore.  All one needs to do in our own
> discipline is to look at the editorial boards of either MLA or NCTE
> publications or the direction of many many essays to see how such claims
> in 2003 are about as valid as conservative declamations of "liberal bias"
> in the media dominated by Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Paul Harvey.

Well...that might be true in the humanities, which has traditionally
always attracted more women.  But we just had a major organizational
meeting at NCSA (large academic tech institution attached to the U of
Illinois), and almost all of the speakers, our most prominent
computational scientists and leaders, were men.  And this was pointed out
several times.  There are lots of women who go into science, and there
were many brilliant, competent female scientists in the audience, but of
all the women who made presentations, only two were scientists--the rest
were educators or technical support (like me).  There are countless
stories from my college years--late eighties, early nineties--of how the
culture--not any inherent lack of ability to reason mathematically or
spatially--shut women out of science and engineering.  As I understand it,
ten years ago, the physics department admissions committee at a major
Midwestern research institution actually was throwing out applications
from women because "they weren't serious."  (I have witnesses, though both
they and the institution will remain nameless to protect the innocent).

> Hence, I still would argue that indeed there are such things as
> stereotypical feminine and masculine differences in writers'
> sensibilities, and more to the point, viva la differance.  Although human
> beings are social animals, we are still, nonetheless, animals with an
> evolutionary past that intermixes with our political agendas.  

Here I would simply say that regardless of the political agenda of, say, a
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who insists that childlessness among women is a tragic
failure to fulfill female biological destiny, I have not a maternal bone
in my body, and neither does at least twenty percent of the female
population, who are considered to be "childless by choice."  Some do
relate experiencing brief surges of maternal hormones (the biological
clock), but these pass, with the sense of "What was I thinking?"

When I said that the male is still the norm by which everything else is
measured, I meant that it's an unexamined norm, and an unfair one,
particularly to men.  I don't think there's enough "men's studies" out
there. Two reactions seem to arise at the suggestion that it's needed:
from the feminists, "All literary studies are men's studies!" and from the
non-feminists, "This isn't going to be a male-bashing course, is it?" When
I taught such a course, it was neither.  The message that both I and the
students got from the course was that men are often blamed, ridiculed, and
held up to impossible, and often rigid and cruel standards and
expectations formed by long-held assumptions about men that go essentially
unexamined, while most of the attention and sympathy is still focused on
women. And that--to get back to Forster and the original question, which
we've hijecked egregiously, I'm afraid--is a very good reason to be
examining male middlebrow anxiety, both among the modernists and in our
current culture.  (Susan Faludi's *Stiffed* is a great book on how it
plays out in contemporary life.) 

The very
> fact that you and I (and others) are, I hope, enjoying the stimulation of
> these exchanges suggests that our evolutionary need to throttle our
> opponents has been tempered via socialization where "combat" is verbal and
> enjoyable, and not a battle to the death for publication, tenure, or who
> gets an office closest to the Chair's.
> 

Certainly not in my case, where I've said goodbye to all that and can
enjoy sparring on these subjects without serious professional consequence.  

And isn't that evolutionary need usually associated with a preponderance
of testosterone? :)

Kathleen 


   

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