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We are drowning in stories that privilege the perspectives of white males
While I don’t expect the current slew of Pistorius biographies to turn up on GCSE reading lists in the near future, the use of terms such as “classic” and “tragic” – applied to Pistorius, not Steenkamp – horrifies me. It illustrates, if nothing else, the extent to which much of the literature we revere centres male subjectivity. Women die, yes, but this matters only in relation to how their death makes their killer feel. Women are expendable, not really there at all; it’s the man who’s left behind, making his excuses, expressing his remorse, despairing of his future, who gets all the attention. It is, we tell ourselves, intriguing; if slaughtered women didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them (and even though they do exist, in shocking numbers, we carry on inventing anyhow; you can never have too many plot devices).
It is for reasons like this that campaigns such as For Books’ Sake’s attempt to achieve greater diversity in GCSE English Literature specifications seem to me vitally important. We are drowning in stories that privilege the perspectives of white males; in spite of ourselves, we buy into the view that the world as they see it is all that there is (if Pistorius is “the only person who can say what his state of mind was,” does anything else matter?). I know there are arguments against demands for more female viewpoints: some of the most prolific crime writers are women; women write about women dying; not every female writer is a feminist by default. I know all this yet I still think it matters that women write, and that young people get to read women writing, whatever the subject matter. It matters because women have stories, too, and all too often ours get cut short. When narration is seen and experienced as male, so, too, is real life.
Whenever women ask for greater representation in politics or the arts, we are of course reminded that not all women are the same. We don’t have some monolithic shared experience so what could we have to offer that isn’t available already? If there’s no single definition of womanhood, then why should we care if most of time it is men who speak? But this is to miss the point. What matters is not that our stories are the same; it is that these stories are ours.
If we have a shared experience as women, it is that of not being seen as, and instead being defined by, men. And yet we are neither mirrors, nor props, nor decoration. We are not mere plot devices in the lives of self-styled tragic heroes; it is just our lot to be positioned that way. When members of the ANC Women’s League stood outside in the courts in protest at the Pistorius verdict, they knew that Reeva Steenkamp’s life – the life of a privileged white woman – had been nothing like their own. They still spoke for her, in sisterhood and solidarity. Steenkamp’s life was not emblematic of other women’s lives but her death, and the shoddy, shameful responses to it ever since, symbolise the low esteem in which all women’s lives are held simply by virtue of them not being the lives of men.
It is for reasons like this that campaigns such as For Books’ Sake’s attempt to achieve greater diversity in GCSE English Literature specifications seem to me vitally important. We are drowning in stories that privilege the perspectives of white males; in spite of ourselves, we buy into the view that the world as they see it is all that there is (if Pistorius is “the only person who can say what his state of mind was,” does anything else matter?). I know there are arguments against demands for more female viewpoints: some of the most prolific crime writers are women; women write about women dying; not every female writer is a feminist by default. I know all this yet I still think it matters that women write, and that young people get to read women writing, whatever the subject matter. It matters because women have stories, too, and all too often ours get cut short. When narration is seen and experienced as male, so, too, is real life.
Whenever women ask for greater representation in politics or the arts, we are of course reminded that not all women are the same. We don’t have some monolithic shared experience so what could we have to offer that isn’t available already? If there’s no single definition of womanhood, then why should we care if most of time it is men who speak? But this is to miss the point. What matters is not that our stories are the same; it is that these stories are ours.
If we have a shared experience as women, it is that of not being seen as, and instead being defined by, men. And yet we are neither mirrors, nor props, nor decoration. We are not mere plot devices in the lives of self-styled tragic heroes; it is just our lot to be positioned that way. When members of the ANC Women’s League stood outside in the courts in protest at the Pistorius verdict, they knew that Reeva Steenkamp’s life – the life of a privileged white woman – had been nothing like their own. They still spoke for her, in sisterhood and solidarity. Steenkamp’s life was not emblematic of other women’s lives but her death, and the shoddy, shameful responses to it ever since, symbolise the low esteem in which all women’s lives are held simply by virtue of them not being the lives of men.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/09/we-are-drowning-stories-privilege-perspectives-white-males
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