An interesting piece by Adam Szetela for Quillette. Extracts:
“The same year Psycho got pulled (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler hit shelves. It turned its author into a celebrity. It also paved the way for a deluge of feminist books that promised to deconstruct, dismantle, and otherwise destroy the patriarchy. If the source of women’s oppression was narrative, then publishers were important sites of struggle. The Great Feminisation of American Publishing had begun…
The Great Feminisation of Publishing has produced three new kinds of literature.
First, there is the literature of obligation. When I was a doctoral student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, I lived in an apartment complex. Another resident of that complex, a fellow doctoral student in literature, invited me over for dinner. After dinner, I was looking at her books. She pulled a book off the top shelf. It was Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. She told me this was a book I had to read. When I asked her why, she said Gay had a traumatic life. That was it.
She didn’t say Gay was brilliant. She didn’t say Gay was an incredible storyteller. She said Gay had been raped. In response, Gay chose to become fat. In her mind, a fat body protects her from men. She is now so “super morbidly obese”—Gay’s words, not mine—event organisers have to purchase special chairs to host her. These facts indicate emotional disturbance—not great literature. But from my colleague’s perspective, there isn’t a difference…
Like the Big Five publishers, the Book Review Industrial Complex is now another corner of literary culture run by upper-class white women who live in New York City. Most of the New York Times’s staff is women. Most of the New Yorker’s staff is women. Most of National Public Radio’s staff is women. Good luck finding a book critic like Christopher Hitchens. The days of pugilistic literary men are over. These days, it’s easier to find a white woman from Yale who thinks her book review is a place to talk about her own relationship with food.
If you don’t believe me, try finding a review of Can’t Hurt Me. It spent over fifty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and even the New York Times didn’t review it. The literary gals aren’t interested in helping authors like David Goggins. They’re not interested in shining their spotlight on a Navy SEAL who tells readers: “If you’re fat you need to change the fact that you’re fat because it’s very fucking unhealthy.” HarperCollins published Roxane Gay’s book. David Goggins self-published his book. I can’t think of a better synecdoche for the state of American publishing.”
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