On not naming and shaming

[oursin]

It has come to my attention that some people may have been irked by my reluctance, on the 'Strong or Stroppy' panel at Wiscon to come out and name particular books that irritated me.

There were at least two reasons for this.

Failure to remember with the kind of accuracy I should like the authors' names &/or the exact titles. Given that these were books I may have given up on partway through. Didn't want to mislead people by naming something that sounded like the book/author that pissed me off, but was actually not.

But more importantly, while I'm quite happy to name books that I think get the strong heroine right (whether as ass-kicking tough or in some other mode), I'm less confident about slagging off on books that, for me, failed. Because, operative term there, for me.

In several cases, I'm sure what happened with a particular book at a particular time was that it was just the catalyst which precipitated my annoyance with (say) trope of female cyborg working for government agency who is surprisingly incompetent. It might work for other people and I don't want to prejudice other readers against it. (This perhaps intersects with the 'Secret Decoder Ring' panel - what the reader brings to a book from previous reading experiences.)

Or indeed, I might have been reading a book at some time when I was feeling particularly picky and nitpicky.

Also, book may have rubbed painfully up against my own personal no-go tropes in other ways besides 'feistiness' in female protag.

But there's also my desire to discuss patterns and themes and tendencies rather than to trash specific books or authors (and some authors do better in other books, they may just have slipped up the once). That can be enjoyable, but is not, for me, an entirely satisfactory approach. As I understood it, the panel was about those general issues, not about 'let's bash on "feisty" heroines who constantly need rescuing'.

Though if that's what people wanted, that's okay too.

It's just not my bag, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, etc.

Comments

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Er, just to be clear - because this sounds like something I said - I didn't say it to encourage trashing authors, or being catty, or anything like that! I firmly believe that it is possible to talk about aspects of a book that do not quite work without implying that the author's work in general or even that very book, overall, is bad.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I wrote a follow-up post (http://oursin.livejournal.com/861868.html) this morning about good and bad books and my sense that bad books tend to fail in similar ways, making for productive generalisation about the ways, whereas good books require discussing in the specific.

Interesting failures, or good books with significant flaws, are horses of a different colour.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

I think it should be at least somewhat up to the individual as to how far she goes and what techniques she employs in calling out other individuals in public. In this I differ from several and perhaps many people whom I deeply respect, and who may see this as a failure of nerve, solidarity, desire to expose my own privilege to calling-out (or simple, typically North European fear of being shamed, in any context), etc. Which is to say that I am happy enough to own any one of these failings at any specific point in time, or as a general tendency, since one probably wouldn't be human without them; but do not believe that a different form of what is, in my opinion, essentially the same praxis makes for any one of these failings, a priori.

I share your concern about being able to verify facts beyond soundbites (how does one know that one's memory or perception is accurate, or represents the whole picture rather than a given moment, especially if an issue is or has become sufficiently complicated), and of being able to distinguish objective truth from annoying subjective experience. This doesn't mean that critique, confrontation, hermeneutics of suspicion, etc., have no value, but rather that it's too easy to assume what one observes in any moment defines the person or work one critiques--which may tend to substitute objectification of the flawed individual for reflection on sociopolitical norms in which we all share. (And which may also easily be US-centered, UK-centered, Euro-centered, early 21st-century centered, etc.--as may be seen by listening to BBC commentary on the US election, which is historic for the US but not necessarily for the whole world as the US imagines it to be defined by the US.)

Which does not mean that one is never right in taking issue, or that sometimes the issue isn't painfully obvious (e.g., that Rachel Moss volunteered to look like a malicious idiot and thus abrogated most of her rights to the benefit of the doubt, apart perhaps from the insanity defense). But I do think it's important to allow people to find their own style in taking issue.