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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher

558 replies

ArabellaScott · 21/01/2022 14:23

Picador are unpublishing - ceasing to distribute - all of Clanchy's books. The article says 'by mutual consent', but it's not a good thing to hear a poet/author being 'cancelled'.

Literature/poetry is not in a healthy state right now.

unherd.com/thepost/picador-cancels-poet-kate-clanchys-books/

In case you missed the brouhaha - Article from last year:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-58151144

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GrammarTeacher · 27/01/2022 18:13

She wasn't cancelled!
Also the book is a safeguarding nightmare: racist, classist, fatphobic and anti-Semitic. And the attitude towards autistic students is despicable.
However, the issue started when she flagged up a GoodReads review saying it should be taken down as it had fake quotes. She would never say anything racist like that. The quotes were not made up. She hounded the reviewer on GoodReads and threatened to contact her employer.
When Dara McAnulty (who was 17 at the time) said he found the description of autistic students unsettling he was hounded by her supporters into a Twitter break!
Three women of colour who discussed the issue were also hounded on Twitter in the press. People not of colour were ignored. It was very stark.

TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse · 27/01/2022 18:26

OK so it turns out where I read that was upthread... but it's on Goodreads as well.

The descriptions of academia upthread are ridiculous mischaracterisations BTW. Academics are hardly immune from the daily grind and rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi.

ArabellaScott · 27/01/2022 18:28

Does anyone have links to clear history/evidence of what happened?

Because we've had a long thread discussing how the book was allegedly 'racist, classist, fatphobic and anti-Semitic', and from what I've read I'd say it was nothing of the sort. So I'm not willing to trust second hand opinions.

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ArabellaScott · 27/01/2022 18:29

@TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse

OK so it turns out where I read that was upthread... but it's on Goodreads as well.

The descriptions of academia upthread are ridiculous mischaracterisations BTW. Academics are hardly immune from the daily grind and rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi.

Okay, Sure: Not All Academics Are Like That.

I was talking about a tendency, certainly not shared by all academics, but increasingly in evidence.

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Sashimimimi · 27/01/2022 18:47

She hounded the reviewer on GoodReads and threatened to contact her employer.

Did she know who the reviewer was and who her employer was? How?

Sashimimimi · 27/01/2022 18:52

When Dara McAnulty (who was 17 at the time) said he found the description of autistic students unsettling he was hounded by her supporters into a Twitter break!

Hounded? Or just ratioed? Pile-ons are never pleasant either way and it’s understandable that he chose to disengage from the whole thing.

Sashimimimi · 27/01/2022 18:53

Three women of colour who discussed the issue were also hounded on Twitter in the press.

Three women of colour were hounded in the press? Really? That’s awful 😢

Sashimimimi · 27/01/2022 18:56

Re the ‘hounding’ on Twitter of the 3 women of colour - was this all out in the open?

TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse · 27/01/2022 18:57

Well, the GoodReads commenter gives her unusual first name and profession and indicates three people she follows on Twitter, probably not too hard to triangulate from that. I don't know if you could get that info from GR itself.

Sashimimimi · 27/01/2022 18:59

Well, the GoodReads commenter gives her unusual first name and profession and indicates three people she follows on Twitter, probably not too hard to triangulate from that. I don't know if you could get that info from GR itself.

😬

NoSquirrels · 27/01/2022 19:12

There were Twitter pile-one of 3 WOC writers.

There may have been similar on Dara McAnulty.

I don’t think KC was necessarily responsible for this, though she didn’t help the situation.

There’s a complaint that the press ignored the social media pile-one to the WOC, thereby erasing an aspect of the news story and making it all about KC and ‘cancelling’, rather than legitimate concerns.

KC quoted one of the WOC in her Prospect article but did not name her. Generous interpretation of this would be she didn’t want to draw another pile-on to that writer’s door. Alternative interpretation (shared by he WOC) is that this was another micro aggression (or just an aggression?) and repeated the silencing, inflaming the situation again.

KC hasn’t behaved brilliantly. Her ‘supporters’ on social media behaved worse - but this is the nature of Twitter particularly and loads of those ‘supporters’ were basically bandwagon-jumping trolls. The WOC have an equally vocal set of supporters who have criticised KC and made her personally culpable for the social media pile-ons. Picador hasn’t helped at all. Her editor made it worse.

I’ve seen the claims repeated about KC attempting to doxx the reviewer but no first-hand evidence.

Ultimately KC is a person with a huge social media following but less than savvy social media skills. That’s my take - her initial ‘mistake’ was to use her social media following to disprove/deny, then failed to apologise well/quickly, then stuff with the WOC took off around her, Philip Pullman et al stoked the fires a tremendous amount and ultimately if everyone had taken this offline and stopped being so opinionated for clicks (on ALL sides) without using human listening skills person to person a huge costly mess could have been averted.

SantaClawsServiette · 27/01/2022 20:59

[quote NoSquirrels]The alternative perspective:
www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/13/pointing-out-racism-in-books-is-not-an-attack-kate-clanchy[/quote]
It's rather begging the question, though.

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 27/01/2022 21:47

Philip Pullman et al stoked the fires a tremendous amount and ultimately if everyone had taken this offline and stopped being so opinionated for clicks (on ALL sides) without using human listening skills person to person a huge costly mess could have been averted.

He really did. Philip Pullman did, as far as I can tell, a keyword search for goodreads on twitter, and laid into people for reviewing books without reading them, even though they weren't even discussing Kate Clanchy's book.

That was how I ended up following the drama.

NoSquirrels · 28/01/2022 00:49

I think my conclusion is that I’m writing to KC via her agent in support/acknowledgment of her position, whilst understanding this was any she wins/she loses.

Everyone lost in this.

I really don’t think any of this furore will ultimately change the inequalities in power in publishing,

Meanwhile a poet-educator with demonstrable success in real-world outcomes for her students via POETRY - poetry!, most marginalised of all contemporary writing - is no-platformed, even if temporarily. Her student poets go unheard.

‘White saviour’ I struggle hugely with.

SantaClawsServiette · 28/01/2022 01:46

What? What did Pullman have to do with any of it?

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 28/01/2022 02:13

He tweeted this under a discussion of whether the time it takes to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand was a worthwhile investment. It was nothing to do with Kate Clanchy.

Critics of Kate Clanchy: is this the kind of support you welcome? Someone who thinks it's not necessary to read a book before condemning it? What a shameful attitude. It would find a comfortable home in Isis or the Taliban.

Chimene Suleyman responded with anger and quote-tweeted him.

Ok so you just compared me and two other brown/Muslim women to ISIS and the Taliban? Is this a sick joke?

twitter.com/chimenesuleyman/status/1424690206159081472?t=JOzKFd-uOyDixUa9qQkfmA&s=19

And that ended up with Society of Authors involvement, and coverage of it in Private Eye

www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/11/society-of-authors-philip-pullman-tweets-kate-clanchy

PurgatoryOfPotholes · 28/01/2022 02:19

As it happened...

Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher
Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher
Kate Clanchy - poet - is 'cancelled' by her publisher
ShinyHappyPoster · 28/01/2022 02:33

@cassandre

She denied accurate quotes from her book were in there, and launched a coordinated attack on two women of colour who had respectfully drawn attention to them

That line about 'coordinated attack on two [three] women of colour' isn't true. She attacked a young white woman teacher who had reviewed her book on Goodreads and had condemned it as racist. And that attack was pretty cringeworthy. But once Twitter took her to task (Monisha Rajesh, Chimene Suleyman, Sunny Singh and others), she apologised. She never attacked women of colour.

Rajesh/Suleyman/Singh have said that they received racist hate mail as a result of the way they criticised Clanchy on Twitter, and that's deplorable, but it's a HUGE leap to say that Clanchy herself was somehow responsible for those attacks.

I was following the whole messy saga on Twitter very closely, and it strikes me as utterly unjust the way that Clanchy's unconscious bias in her book (which she did eventually apologise for) was equated with the awful racist messages Rajesh, Suleyman and Singh received behind the scenes from internet trolls.

I believe those three women when they say they were targeted by racists, but on Twitter, I never saw them receiving hate, I saw them receiving a huge amount of support.

I did see tweets telling Clanchy she should commit suicide because she's such an awful person.

Clanchy appealed for people to come out and say her book wasn't racist, and that move backfired spectacularly, but I haven't seen a single tweet of hers criticising women of colour. On the contrary, she apologised to women of colour.

I agree with you, OP. Picador ceasing to publish all her books, not just the book at the centre of the controversy, is complete overkill. Ironically, one of the books they've 'cancelled' is compilation of poems by the refugee pupils Clanchy taught.

This kind of intolerance and virtue-signalling is not making the world a better place.

Yy I followed it on Twitter at the time and that is what it looked like. It's a stretch and inaccurate to say Clanchy was involved in racism. Iirc some of the people who attacked Clanchy had been involved in attacking other writers too.

There was also the issue that numerous students described in the book spoke in defence of Clanchy and supported her descriptions of themselves. But they were completely drowned out by others feeling 'offended' on their behalf.

There was a real push for sanitising the teaching experience or forcing teachers to pretend they do not see difference and they never struggle. Pushing that type of fantasy isn't brave or just or right. Neither is it laudable for middle class writers and publishing staff to be patronising and paternalistic to those people who knew Clanchy and were happy with their descriptions.

There was a strong message that uninvolved gatekeepers would decide how certain people could speak and how people could be described. It showed the worst of publishing and considering how many awful no-platforming scandals publishing has been involved in on Twitter, that's quite a feat.

TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse · 28/01/2022 06:20

There's one person on the GR thread that kicked all this off claiming to have been a pupil of hers and taking an anti-KC stance. Whether it's a real former student is anyone's guess of course.

ArabellaScott · 28/01/2022 07:39

Thanks, Purgatory. What a mess.

poetry!, most marginalised of all contemporary writing - you know what they say: they fight so hard because the stakes are so low....

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ArabellaScott · 28/01/2022 07:41

There was a strong message that uninvolved gatekeepers would decide how certain people could speak and how people could be described

That's largely the impression I'm getting.

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TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse · 28/01/2022 07:45

And actually I think it's OK to diss a book even if you haven't read the whole thing. I've never even seen a copy of The Fountainhead, let alone read it, but on the basis of what I've read about it I'm comfortable saying it's complete pish.

TwentyFirstCenturyTricoteuse · 28/01/2022 07:46

I'm not sure who I understand who the uninvolved gatekeepers are in this scenario, are we talking Pullman and co or the critics of the book? Could go either way.

ShinyHappyPoster · 28/01/2022 09:28

The uninvolved gatekeepers were the people being 'offended' on the students' behalf when the students and their families were clearly saying they weren't offended and they supported Clanchy. These students and families weren't anonymous people claiming to be her students.

And actually I don't think you can 'diss' a book you haven't finished or read. You can say why you think you don't like it but it's hardly robust literary criticism if you didn't finish it. You have no idea how it developed or changed. I can say I didn't like Cloud Atlas and didn't finish it. I can't say it's a shit book because I have no idea.