Dear feminist writers of fiction and poetry,
I’m putting together an article on how feminist writers deal with sexism and racism when it comes up in workshop environments. I’d like to gather as many answers as possible.
Many workshops are voluntary, so one can choose to leave when racist or sexist material comes up — but only if one is willing to deprive oneself of the feedback. Some workshops are compulsory, however, particularly when one has signed up for a class. Voluntary or compulsory, workshops are always a unique combination of work and play. On the one hand, one is usually friend with ones workshop peers, but on the other, for working writers a workshop can also be a functional and essential part of how one prepares one’s work.
Workshops can also become hotbeds for emotional turmoil, since the material in question is so personal.
If you’re planning to stay in a workshop, you have to create a business relationship with the other people involved. So what do you do when one of them writes a story with blatant racist or sexist content? I think this has happened to all of us; certainly, it happens in the workshops I’m in.
How do you handle it? If you’re interested in contributing to my project of discovering methods, I hope you’ll consider the topic and let me know. Comments are appreciated, or you can drop me a line at rachel dot swirsky at gmail dot com. Anywhere between 200 and 750 words on the topic would be fantastic, although if you want to just write a few lines, that’s fine too. I’m interested in hearing from feminist men and women, and anti-racist whites and non-whites.
Feel free to address the topic in any manner of your choosing, and defining your own questions and agenda. For those of you who’d like a few questions to get you started, here they are:
*When you encounter racist or sexist (or otherwise bigoted) material in a workshop setting, how do you deal with it? Do you ignore it? Do you call it out? How do you decide whether to ignore it or call it out?
*How do you call out racist and sexist material while preserving your relationships in the workshop? What techniques do you use? How do you vary them based on context (power dynamics in the group, your own place in the group, the type of racist or sexist material being presented)?
*Have you ever decided not to call something out? What happened? How did you feel afterward?
*Have you ever regretted calling something out? Why? What happened?
*Have you ever quit a workshop because of racist or sexist material?
*What was the most offensive thing (on the lines of bigotry) you’ve ever encountered in workshop? (Please describe it in generic terms.) How did you react?
*How do other people in workshop situations tend to react when you note offensive material? How does it vary between workshops you’ve been in, and why do you think it varies that way?
*Anecdotes that you can tell without compromising yourself or anyone else (changing names and story subject matter helps) would be quite appreciated.
*Have you ever been in a workshop that was a safe space for race or sex? What was it like? Did it feel limiting or limited?
*How can workshop leaders (or the group in an acephalous workshop) create a positive environment? What environments have worked best for you?
I need responses by this Sunday, November 4th.
Okay, I’m a sci-fi/fantasy writer whose experience with workshops entirely consist of generally feminist-run or feminist-friendly writing professors in a college environment so I’m not sure I’m the best one to answer the question.
I think the two largest things in a workshop are who’s running it and also the racist or sexist’s author’s assholity.
I’ve had experiences with racist or sexist works, but they were resolved peacefully because the people running it were feminist or feminist-friendly, many of the students were feminist or feminist-friendly, and the student who presented the work were merely unconsciously racist or sexist. In these situations, we as a class politely and sometimes less politely took him (and it was always a him in my experiences) to task for each iteration of a racist stereotype and for each iteration of flat, sexist depictations of women. In these cases, since the writer was only unconsciously racist or sexist and wanted to be better writers, they took the advice which was given in a manner that was firm and calling them out, but also sympathetic and presented from the standpoint of “I hope you didn’t mean “this” as that was what I got from this section, character, or plotline”. They sometimes asked dumb questions revealing ignorance, but since they were open to criticism, they took the firm, angry, but simultaneously kindly advice as it was stressed and underlined. Perhaps, they ignored it in their final drafts, but they did so after having their unconscious racism and sexism dissected as well as the poor writing that comes from any time you rely on stereotypes and alienating depictions.
Again, I was lucky in this regard. My SO who also took feminist friendly writing workshops encountered assholes who would deliberately write something offensive because these feminist professors dared to have a spot wherein their insecurities about their own manliness would not be treated like gospel. They deliberately wrote offensive works like one who wrote a poorly written essentially philosophy/evo pscyh “experimental” essay (read: MRA rant as you would find in the basement of the internet) about how women were inferior in every way, men superior in every way and why should women be allowed to think much less vote. This more assholic person was more violently taken to task by the workshop, because the asshole was obviously trying to be sexist. The workshop stepped in and the participants took the asshole to task and he basked in their negative attention as they fulfilled his desire to feel like a “victim”. Annoying, but then it felt like an aberration in a friendly environment and everyone ignored his hate-filled criticisms of their own work and overall shut him out of much of the discussion.
I have no real experience with what I imagine is what you are really looking for and the meat of the issue. An asshole is bad, but an asshole in a poorly run workshop or a workshop that is “neutral” (read= biased to the status-quo and populated by people who sympathize more with a sexist or racist than the feminist or anti-racist complaining about it). In this case, I imagine, the questions asked depend on how much an abberation the asshole is and how “neutral” your own work is. A workshop that rallies around a racist or sexist and dismisses any rational complaints of character depiction that are presented in good faith even if from a position of anger may be a pisspoor place to judge a piece of work that makes statements of anti-racism, feminism, or even have more depictions of said characters. Thus, the workshop doesn’t fulfill its duty to you, the feminist writer and there is little point in staying in it. If the work feels like an aberration and the writer isn’t an asshole about their entitlement or the workshop is willing to accept your complaints as valid to the discussion and a topic of interest, then the feeling is different and even if the condemnation isn’t strong enough to foster meaningful change, the objections are out there to be thought about by not only the writer in question but every writer there. This comes in handy both in helping them through their own entitlement as well as being able to understand the place your own writing may come from which provides better comments for oneself on whether or not you are succeeding at your goals as a writer.
The final question I guess is in regards to “neutral” writing spaces wherein your own writing is “neutral”. In these cases, the comments on your own piece may be worthwhile, but they may treat an asshole like he has a point and you like you don’t. Again, one has to decide for oneself if the commenters will be able to provide useful commentary on your story if they are so willing to let bad writing and stereotyping in this story get a free pass. Ignoring commentary from idiots is also a common good habit and can reduce a lot of stress.
On that note, I did attend one “neutral” workshop wherein my work was feminist-leftist-leaning with a biracial lesbian couple as the main heroine and her sidekick. In that one author who was an asshole who wrote a racist and sexist story about a man and his mexican friend who are betrayed by an evil woman in a 1984 ripoff plotline and punished by the bad evil government with near death made comments onto my own story that the very inclusion of homosexual characters obviously made it porn because he couldn’t imagine two women any other way than titilation. In this case, I rejected his comments pretty much wholesale (only using those which focused on grammar) and focused on the comments from the rest of the group. On his work, because I had presented first and already took him to task on the homophobia and because he was not interested in the class in general, I left minimal comments, because it was useless to do otherwise and abstained from the discussion except for slight comments on the unbelievability of the story and reccomendations for more 3-D characters.
Again I think the whole thing, everything I stated, can be summarized as: It depends on who’s running the workshop, who’s attending the workshop, and how much of an asshole the racist/sexist is. This will dictate whether or not you can make honest, but constructive, criticisms of the racism and sexism or if you will be treated like a freak. And if the workshop is unwilling to accept your criticisms of racism and sexism valid, how are they likely to find the feminism or anti-racism or multiculturalism of your own work any more valid or otherwise be able to provide honest and more importantly useful comments on said work? In this case, if you have a choice, it might be best to move on if the workshop is hostile.
A hostile workshop=A bad workshop, which will be unable to help you as a writer hone your craft to your own vision instead of a dominant narrative of racism and sexism.
I’ve been in a number of poetry workshops, all within a University setting. Luckily, nothing racist or sexist ever came up, although now and again students would use inappropriate comments, such as “retarded.” At that point, the prof in charge would step in and discuss the inappropriateness of the language. For the most part, that technique worked. Of course, the prof has a level of authority that may not exist in all workshop settings, and what appeared to be consensus may have simply been deference to his position.
I’m just beginning to run my own workshop (this is our second week!) so this post came at a good time, at least for me. While I can’t seem to be much help to you, I’m going to forward these questions over to my cohorts and see what they have to say about it.
Also, as a final note, this may or may not apply – but I also work as a writing tutor in my University’s writing center. Obviously, the one-to-one tutorial is different from the workshop setting, and we handle academic writing much more than creative writing, but the same concerns do creep up. If you’d be interested, I have a whole stack of articles on the subject that I could forward to you. Most of them are more academic in scope and language, and again I don’t know how precisely they apply to what you’re looking for – but I’d be more than happy to share. You can reach me at monkey6079 _at_ gmail.dot.com or via the website listed.