Constructing narratives to ignore women

[IdealistAndProudOfIt]

This is an older piece of writing but I've only just stumbled across it and wanted to share it.

aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/

It's about women being ignored generally as well as specifically fighters. Making me wish I'd gone further into history and could help to rewrite it as it was! Just off to look up the viking women fighters.

How often do we all fall into these traps every day?

[unrealhousewife]

The concept that women are not just necessary garnish for a world owned by men is still very new (in our developed world anyway) and we need to protect it.

[Tanacot]

Well there's a class element as well. My granny wrote all her life but cause she had 11 kids and lived in a council house, and wrote about that as if it mattered (but not a tragedy), she was never taken seriously by anybody and never will be. My other granny's cousin also wrote about her own (yes marginalised but big colonial estate) life as if it mattered, and she is taught in schools and taken VERY seriously these days. I do think it matters also if you write from a big house vs a small one and that what you say has to fit into someone else's agenda (even a "progressive" agenda). Like, you can write about your life as a woman if it's all about your misery and resistance, then that's valid and intellectual, but anything else is chicklit or housewifey and how stupid you are to think your life is interesting and worth celebrating. So those perspectives are edited out.

I and a very few others have been selected as a representative "canon" and so I get a disproportionate amount of attention and interest from outsiders for my art (it's taught on courses and shown in museums which I find lolarious but there you go) compared to the tens of thousands of others in my community, and it's obvious that's because mine fits in with the agendas of the academics and journos and doesn't actually challenge them (it's not slo-mo-romo, it doesn't have a ton of embarrassing undisguised female sexual longing etc etc). It's actually not that representative, though, so they're not fully engaging with the art for itself, imo, only looking for aspects that they already accept as valid. The only time really more representative stuff is shown is when it's being mocked. Because that's what people do to stuff that is really properly challenging and uncomfortable. This is the experience of every subculture that is cherry picked and mainstreamed, I guess.

Anyway, I massively digress. Clara Driscoll : The first Tiffany lamp was created around 1895. ... Its designer was not, as had been thought for over 100 years, Louis Comfort Tiffany, but a previously unrecognized artist named Clara Driscoll. [She] was identified in 2007 by Rutgers professor Martin Eidelberg as being the master designer behind the most creative and valuable leaded glass lamps produced by Tiffany Studios.

[TunipTheUnconquerable]

This is a stonkingly interesting thread. Just marking place.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

idea - did you catch the series by Amanda Vickery on women and art? It was really good - I was listening to comments on twitter about it and it sounds as if she believes the art world is still incredibly dodgy about women. She was having - literally - to ask museum and gallery owners to get women's work out of the basements so she could have a look, because they weren't displaying it.

[PetulaGordino]

LRD i think like all these things it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially as galleries and museums have to get people through the doors in ever-increasing numbers to justify their own existence

therefore more important male artists' work displayed = more visitors = more male artists' work displayed etc etc and more women's work gathering dust in storage

(see also the bee in my own personal bonnet - measurement of impact of academic output and how that measurement increases the "gap" in perceived quality of the work of male and female researchers)

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

YY, absolutely.

Although I think it is so stupid, because it perpetuates this idea 'men won't be interested in women, but women are interested in men' (cf. 'little boys won't read books about female heroes' ). Personally, I am quite bored of the men by now.

[weatherall]

There's the racial invisibility too. Everyone knows Florence nightingale but mary seacole is often forgotten.

[PetulaGordino]

oh indeed. one of my areas of interest is about the unintended consequences of defining a particular measurement as the mark of success

this is particularly in terms of what gets funded (research, exhibitions, events etc)

in almost all these measurements of impact women lose out

[UptoapointLordCopper]

There was a book review ages ago about a novel about a woman who asked male artists to exhibit her works (and it all went horribly wrong, as you might imagine):

www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/15/blazing-world-siri-hustvedt-review

I haven't read it though - thought it could be interesting but just haven't got round to it.

I had a conversation once about hiring people in academia - it's all about increasing the prestige of your institution. Hence if women are usually not considered as high in esteem as men are you end up with the situation that we are in in many disciplines. But I'm sick of talking about this.

[MontyGlee]

I'm just starting a memoir of Martha Gellhorn's. Why was she taken seriously? (Or wasn't she, very?) In the first few chapters the fact that she's a woman is a complete irrelevance. but she's up to all sorts!

[Ifpigscouldfly]

Probably the most invisible woman of all and yet she is responsible for the biggest advances in modern medical research. hentietta lacks

What makes it worse is that no consent was ever given from this lady or her family for the scientists and Drs to do what they did and even now her cells are still being used by science.

[IdealistAndProudOfIt]

Well that shows how much I knew about art (not that I've ever claimed knowledge). My dh looked at me incredulously when I said I thought women were acknowledged in art, puleed out one of his more recent (60's-80's) arts books, and leafed through it saying 'bloke, bloke, bloke, nope, no women'. That is absolutely appalling! What possible justification could anyone hope to give for that? I'd guess that of the people I've stumbled across producing or studying art, most were women.

Regarding the traps we all fall into, I have to confess that for years I actively avoided reading Sheri Tepper - I'm a big sci-fi fan, but she was described as a feminist writer, and I wanted to read good stories not good rants. I should have born in mind how much behind europe the US is in such matters, either on gender or race. I now have several of her books. 'Grass' should be on any list of top sf works.

The turning of the term feminism into a four-letter word, to the extent that many of us are ashamed to call ourselves feminists, should rank as one of men's anti-women crimes I think.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Erm ... I dunno whether I'm allowed to link, but I've blogged about this before, and also today, pretty much in response to this thread.

[UptoapointLordCopper]

LRD can you pm me your blog?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I can. Cos I am indeed a self-promoting arsehole of the first water.

(It really is honestly more because I'm all 'oooh, I want to talk about this and write about this and it's so exciting' at the moment).

[PetulaGordino]

if you're not wanting to put it on the thread, please could I request a pm too?

[Quangle]

Arguably the two most successful female writers in Britain show how far we have to come. JK Rowling effectively had to do an Acton and Currer Bell to get a readership. And Hilary mantel hit the big time when she wrote as a man in a man's world. If she'd written the same books from the perspective of Anne Boleyn they'd be badged as historical fiction not literary fiction which is about men and men's pursuits

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Course. I'm not being coy, btw, MNHQ has fairly strict rules about not linking to your own blog.

quangle - YY, that is so true.

Also, you know, a lot of people assume Mantel is a man (or did when she was less famous). Depressing that anyone in 2014 thinks she's a man with a rare male name, not, uh, a woman ...

[PetulaGordino]

Out of interest what is the other one?

[PetulaGordino]

Thanks lrd!

[TortoiseUpATreeAgain]

I don't think they object to posting one link to a blog, buried deep within a relatively obscure thread, when lots of people have begged you for it.

It's the starting new threads with "An interesting thing happened to me today. I was walking down the street when suddenly Theresa May ran past me pursued by a large polar bear. Check out my blog (link provided) for more details of what happened next." that gets cracked down on, I think.

[TortoiseUpATreeAgain]

Or Buffy can link to your blog. Then you aren't linking to your own blog and the guidelines remain unbesmirched.