FROM ALL-MALE CONFERENCE conference panels (‘manels’) to male-dominated culture events, the message is clear: women are still marginal.
Though increasingly there is push-back on this message, via social media, and activist campaigns like Waking the Feminists (#WTF), we are still far from equality, and even further from diversity, in academic and cultural line-ups.
I have been asked in the past to be the “token woman” on a panel or in a photoshoot (and yes, in one case, the request actually used the words ‘token woman’). I don’t like it, but I generally say yes, just to make sure there’s actually a woman involved.
At least in this instance, women and men sit on the same panel. Because the other option, and a response that programmers often take, is to try to create ‘balance’ by introducing a female-only strand to the programme.
Theatres seem to do this a lot. I recently saw a play at the Abbey with an all-female cast. I was sceptical. ‘Well, that’s their gender quota taken care of for the year,’ I said to my friend. ‘Are you never happy?’ he jokingly responded.
Well, no.
A bad feminist?
Maybe I’m a bad feminist. I don’t like International Women’s Day either. I get that it’s meant as a corrective; I get that the day is used to raise public consciousness about gender equality; I get that, as one senior male colleague put it, ‘I’m missing the point’.
But he’s also missing my point. Because after all the nice purple ‘Happy International Women’s Day’ balloons are gone, and all the ‘aren’t women great’ posters have come down, I just don’t know how transformative this kind of consciousness-raising is.
In June, I was invited to be part of an all-female panel on ‘New Women’s Writing’ at the UCD Festival. The panel’s conversation focussed on the stylistic diversity of women’s writing, the number of both debut and high-profile women writers currently being published, and the success stories of small presses bringing new voices to new readers. We did not talk about scarcity, but about abundance.
We also talked about inequalities in the sector – as Anne Enright’s gauntlet-throwing article last year in the London Review of Books illustrated, we are still faced with the wearyingly persistent view of women as writers of small domestic narratives, and men as writers of big social themes.
Gender imbalance
Not only that, but women also contend with the gender imbalance of the books review pages of major newspapers and other ways in which – from festivals to prizes – our writing is still struggling for equal recognition.
The panel talked about the social media hashtags that draw attention to women’s writing (#readwomen), and we praised Dublin City Council for choosing The Long Gaze Back as its One City One Book this year. We all know the importance of these kinds of choices – because you cannot be what you cannot see. But being seen, while important, is not a guarantor of anything. After all, to quote the theatre critic Peggy Phelan, if ‘visibility equals power then almost naked young white women should be running Western society’.
This paradox is one of the reasons that, though I am very grateful to be included in any literary event, given my ‘new’ status, and though I appreciate that there are issues specific to women writers that benefit from being discussed within dedicated spaces, I am still ambivalent about the ‘women’s panel’.
Internal resistance
My contradictory reaction to events labelled ‘women’ takes three forms. First, I have an internal resistance to the idea that all females, in Judith Butler’s words, ‘belong to that seamless category … women’. There is much to be said for solidarity (not least collective bargaining power), but we also need to recognise difference and diversity.
And so I chafe under the label ‘woman’ because it seems to put me in an exclusive gender-category, which is assumed to be more definitive than all the other aspects of my life and work.
Second, it’s about how a single focus can highlight issues, but also create ghettos. This thought was with me as I was deciding what to read that day at the UCD Festival.
I have an essay, ‘Notes on Bleeding’, on the social rules that restrict women from revealing the truths about their bodies, from menstruation to body hair. It’s an essay I’m particularly proud of. But I decided I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t read it, because I could not bring myself to be a woman writer on a panel entitled ‘New Women’s Writing’ doing a reading about my period.
Easier to talk about someone else
Instead, I read from an essay about my father’s alcoholism and liver failure, because at the end of the day it’s always easier to talk about someone else’s body than your own. And after the reading, two people came up to me to say that they could identify with what I’d written. In that moment, I felt that I had made the right choice in deciding to read a ‘gender-neutral’ piece.
My third reason for demurring over panels on ‘women’s writing’ is that they are so often populated exclusively by women, for an audience predominantly made up of women. Through our participation in these events, women get to hear and enjoy discussions of the kinds of writers who so often don’t get space at ‘mainstream’ events. But that’s not all we’re doing.
Because we’re also performing an extra task – the labour of fixing sexism. As Audre Lorde puts it, women ‘are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of … ignorance … as to our existence and our needs’.
Through ‘women-focussed’ events, productions and anthologies, women undertake extra labour in order to address gender inequality. There are a significant number of feminist men involved too, but in the main it is women who perform this work. (Lorde said that in 1979 by the way, a salutary reminder that this is not a new conversation.)
Irony of my critique
The irony of my critique here is not lost on me – I dislike and criticise the women’s panel, even as I benefit from it. This irony demonstrates how, as women writers and critics, we inhabit our own, as well as others’, contradictions.
And here’s another contradiction. My assumption that I should not read about my body publicly because it is somehow too female has been complicated since my essays have been published.
It is, against my expectations, often men who have talked to me about ‘Notes on Bleeding’, about the emotions they feel about menstruation from their admiration of the capabilities of women’s bodies to the respect and sorrow they have for women who are severely affected by their periods. I was afraid that bleeding wasn’t relevant to men, but I was wrong.
I was wrong because I had bought into the false binary of women/men which conditions us to believe that the bodies, lives and cultural outputs of women and men are not just separate, but oppositional or mutually exclusive.
In this, we have a lot to learn from the Trans movement, and the recognition that gender identity exists and is performed on a spectrum. I fell into the binary trap, because while I can see some forms of inequality, it is hard to escape other kinds of conditioning.
Women bearing responsibility
I can sometimes be dismayed by the women-only panel. But most of all, I am dismayed that it is still so necessary. I am tired of all the gender inequality in society and culture, and I am tired of the idea that women should bear the responsibility for fixing it.
I am tired, and I am sure you are tired too. But until the time that we achieve real cultural diversity – which is a lot bigger than heterosexual, cisgender white women getting on panels – we can’t rest.
We have to keep working, we have to keep critiquing, we have to keep counting.
Emilie Pine is associate professor of drama at the School of English, Drama and Film, UCD. Her collection of personal essays, Notes to Self, is out now with Tramp Press.
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