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Giving Thanks

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Or, All the Pretty Discourses

So it’s that time of year again—the one filled with stress and panic and copious amounts of alcohol. Not for me, you understand, for the doctoral candidates knocking up my inbox to have their dissertations edited in time. I want to take this opportunity to say, “Thanks, grad students!” Not just for the PayPal infusions, although I like those too, but because every thesis or dissertation I read teaches me something new. There’s a reason I give you guys a discount, and it’s not entirely due to my commitment to higher education.

Here’s what I learned about this week: critical discourse analysis and its sassy younger sister, feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis (go on, read it—it’s a short paper, and it explains both terms). I waded in Foucault and Derrida in grad school, but that wasn’t the main course of my study, so this was all new to me. The sparkly bit that caught my eye?

FPDA believes in complexity rather than polarization of subjects of study.

What’s that mean? Basically, it means that this method of analyzing discourse (any kind, the weirder the better, apparently) prefers not to divide speakers into powerful vs. powerless, voiced vs. voiceless, oppressor vs. oppressed. The official reason is because power tends to shift, elevating the formerly oppressed into a role of authority. The unofficial but obvious reason? Because complexity is much more interesting, especially for writers, who, presumably, are writing about people and what they have to say. Polarity can be very limiting.

Enough about scholarly analysis of discourse. Earlier this evening I attended a book launch and listened to this woman talk about a character she created for a fictional habitat who ultimately never made it into the book. Most writers do this, but it isn’t discussed often: so much informs a story that the end readers never even know about. There are marginal or interstitial voices surrounding every narrative, fictional or not, and reacting to it, shaping it. We only hear half of the conversation.

Anyway, if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving next week, enjoy it and any related days off. While you’re sitting around the table, imagine what scholars would do with your family conversation. How would they quantify it? What roles would they assign? Whose voice is absent yet still profoundly shaping the discourse?

 

feminism writing

Yes, It Does Matter—Choose Your Words Wisely

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Here’s a term I hate right now: “mommy.” As in mommy cards, mommy porn, mommy aerobics. Two people I’m very fond of call me mommy and I’m not offended, but everybody who uses it as a dismissive and therefore degrading shorthand for “woman of childbearing age”—yeah, I’m talking to you.

Let’s focus on mommy porn because it’s making a ton of noise and money. Porn has been around forever. From naughty postcards to VHS to streaming video, porn has been a driving force in entertainment technology. If you enjoy it and have a clear understanding of the difference between the fantasy you’re consuming and the reality of actual interpersonal relationships, great! Knock yourself out. Its value as art or cultural barometer is entirely subjective and ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant is that 1) recently a subgenre of erotic fiction has been selling ridiculous amounts of books, and 2) journalists and critics have coined a term to reduce the genre and its consumers, to make them safer, less important, and sort of cute in an embarrassing way, like baby drool. What’s wrong with erotica? Or, if you’re put off by the literary implications, just call it porn. Or even women’s porn. Personally, I like the term “smut.”

In earlier times, when society ladies went to visit one another and found their desired hostess not at home, they left a card with the butler so the lady in question would know who had stopped by. Calling cards were elegant and let every woman know exactly where in the social hierarchy she fit. Mommy cards are like business cards that only contain personal contact information. Women hand them out at parks and toddler enrichment classes to organize “playdates” (another term that bugs the crap out of me). Are there daddy cards? No, dads simply text or call one another so they have a name and number saved on their phone, and then they go home and watch daddy porn, also known as porn.

Are you seeing the pattern? The set {mommy X} includes stuff that regular people don’t care about or need, like calling cards to micromanage their kids’ social lives, five-passenger vehicles, wussy fitness classes, high-waisted jeans, or books about sex with vampires. The set {regular people} is equal to the sets {useful members of society} and {people who like good stuff} and excludes {mommies}. Labeling erotic books and movies targeted to women as mommy porn is insulting both to mothers and people who aren’t mothers but enjoy that particular form of entertainment. It’s also likely to confuse the heck out of a certain type of fetish enthusiast. And, no, this isn’t intended (entirely) as a feminist screed but an example of how a word, even a loving one, can become a blunt instrument when used thoughtlessly. Think about your words, and write with courage and precision. The attention-grabbing choice isn’t always the most effective one.