I was recently invited to a conference about contemporary women writers. One of my favourite American authors was delivering the keynote, and I jumped at the chance to attend.
This author delivered a lecture about the changing face of the publishing landscape in terms of gender representation, asserting that there was what she termed a 'new universality' in the world of letters. The (masculine) old guard, she said, is on the decline, and is being replaced by a younger, and more gender-balanced type of media comprised of mastheads like n+1, The New Inquiry, and Jezebel, many of which are edited by, and regularly feature, young female journos and essayists, as well as their male peers.
'No one reads Harpers any more except for people in doctors' waiting rooms,' she added. And it was a heartening to hear. Except when you began to consider how Harpers still pays per word, and The New Inquiry, and independent DIY magazines like it, pay a $100 flat-rate for their long-form essays, and can therefore only really afford to employ young people and women. But that's perhaps another conversation.
VIDA is a literary organisation interested in the issue of female representation in top-tier magazines and literary prizes. They publish an annual report on women's representation in the literary pages of magazines like Harpers and The New Yorker and The Atlantic: the old guard. By critiquing the inequitable representation, they've urged publications to consider that employing female writers costs magazines neither quality nor profitability.
But, the keynote speaker said, women ought to stop beating down the doors of powerful institutions like those, because they are losing tract of their own accord: women should instead recognise that the most interesting and important conversations are taking place in the margins.
I felt emboldened. 'I work for, and contribute to, marginal publications,' I remembered. 'Maybe our conversations really are the important ones.' And then the conference ended, and I returned to the real world.
In the real world, I began a short course in French literary theory and politics. I thought it would be useful for me to better understand the context some of my favourite critics were writing in. I soon discovered that just two of the 20 scholars and authors we would look at in the class were women, and gender would not be addressed at all.
When I politely questioned if there happened to be more women scholars talking at the time, and if gender was something that might benefit the analysis, the lecturer, an otherwise generous and thorough academic, noted the misogyny of the period (the '60s) and said the feminist critics I mentioned would need an entire course of their own.
'Women's lit' needs a course of its own — how original. To segment women's work into a category of its own is to say that it has no bearing on the mainstream. Men's work is universal, and women's work is specific to women. Sixty-five years later, and Simone de Beauvoir still nails it: 'man represents both the positive and the neutral ... whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity'.
When courses about women thinkers and authors do come up, their lectures tend to be populated by women, queer men, and a few sympathetic others. Inside that world, the world I inhabit, it's easy to forget about the real world beyond, where it's very uncommon to hear questions about how gender affects the ways we consume, study, and monetise culture.
Knocking down barriers to access is one way of going about things; the VIDA count has pushed publications like The Paris Review to reach a near-equal gender representation in their pages. VIDA's concerns also stimulated the creation of our very own Stella Prize, which is the other way of going about things. That is, recognising the powers operating at the centre, and starting new projects in spite of them.
So how ought we to address this? Feminise the mainstream? Or continue to participate at the margins, and hope that the old guard takes notice of our endeavours?
On the one hand, to begin a project at the margins is to forgo the money and power that is contained at the centre: to write for DIY journals is to sacrifice the per-word rate of the established press. On the other hand, the margins are shifting, and that means the centre is as well: perhaps it is worth holding on to the edge a few more decades, and then find that the edge is the centre and money and power will flow freely, and all courses will consider how women's voices have been marginalised in the history of letters.
Until then, I'll see you at the next women's writers conference.
Ellena Savage is an Australian journalist and editor who edits an entertainment and pop culture magazine in Ho Chi Minh City. She tweets as @RarrSavage