Oh no! Who will protect the interests of the white male?

[slemslempike]

"The all-white-male canon has been gone quite a while," said Bonita LaBelle, who directs the English program at Shrewsbury High School. Unfortunately, it's in favor of making kids read The Joy Luck Club over, say, Slaughterhouse-Five. Quite the dumb move. I mean, you might get weepy fourteen-year-old girls' attention, but aren't the real targets in high school English classes the boys, who tend to lag behind girls in reading? (But yes, definitely drop The Scarlet Letter. No one actually reads that.) (Bookslut)

Argh. Now, I've never read either The Joy Luck Club or Slaughterhouse-Five, so I can't comment on the merits of those particular examples (but I think it's telling that those were the ones the critic picked out of the article). However, the general attitude of "let's make reading fun for boys" is exactly the sort of thing I'm going to be looking at for my PhD. I do (kind of) understand the worry about boys' "underachievement" (but it's more important to note that boys are performing better than in previous years, and in fact race, for example, is a far more worrisome divide than gender, not to mention class), but the only answer that seems to get pushed forward is making reading "more fun" for boys.

Why shouldn't girls get books that interest them? The point of English is, primarily, to teach critical skills (and I think that the attitudes expressed in the article don't appeciate the ways in which these can be applied to all genres of literature; we studied Mills and Boon books at uni, for goodness' sake), but the texts that are used in schools are vitally important tools of socialisation. Most texts already favour boys' interests over girls' (my mother is writing a complaints letter about KS2 SATs reading comprehension), and the idea that it is appropriate, never mind fair, to further marginalise girls' interests and sense of self, is abhorrent.

Comments

[coconutswirl.livejournal.com]

I have serious reservations about bookslut these days, by the by.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I find myself increasingly annoyed/sneering at their assumptions and the general level of (un)intelligent criticism. I was expecting America-centric (and that's kind of why I read it, most of my sources are English, with a few British, and one or two European), but the tone's gone downhill.

[coconutswirl.livejournal.com]

Over the last few months there have been a couple of times when I contemplated erasing them from my blogroll. If you want Nort-American coverage, bookninja or The Elegant Variation will be your best bets. Some people like Conversational Reading but I don't. grr.

If I say mid-20th C Brit poetry with an emphasis on 60s and 70s, what will you say? I already have Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney & Basil Bunting but I thought I needed some women too.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Will have to look at my lists when I'm at home, as I can never remember dates of people. Mostly I have themed collections rather than chronology, so I'll have a flick.

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

Oooh. That's quite difficult!

Skipping along the shelves produced several names that caught my eye, but the 60s/70s proved tricky (plus, of course, the whole British thing...). Stevie Smith? U.A.Fanthorpe? Elaine Feinstein? We can't, strictly, claim Fleur Adcock, though we can try...

slemslempike, I'd be interested in any names you come up with.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about Stevie Smith and U.A. Fanthorpe as well, and Elizabeth Jennings, although I've not read very much of her work.

Fleur Adcock claims some Britishness, doesn't she? So I don't see why not... my copy of The Virago Book of Wicked Verse lists her as "England".

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

The Virago Book of Wicked Verse

*smile* I like that collection!

I think that FA was born in New Zealand of an Irish family (not sure how recently they'd moved there). But she's lived here for *ages*, and I think she's done all her writing here, and heck, let's just say she's British. :-)

Yikes. I'm not sure I remember anything of Elizabeth Jennings. Thanks for the pointer! I'll go and see what I can find in the anthologies.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I've only come up with Stevie Smith, U.A. Fanthorpe, Elizabeth Jennings and Fleur Adcock (on a technicality). That's poets with a largeish body of work, I have a few more poets I don't know with poems in anthologies. My taste is more for the 80s/90s.

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

My taste is more for the 80s/90s.

Mine, too. I tend to think of most of the names we've just mentioned as people that my mother read, because that's how I discovered them. I suppose, really, I should return the favour, and make sure that she's read people like Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope!

[majea.livejournal.com]

Grrrrrrr. You've hit on one of my pet peeves. It is true that, in English classes, it is much easier to get the girls to read novels directed more toward boys that the other way around, but simply pandering to that is hardly the solution. Why aren't we challenging these preconceptions? We push Hemingway over Austen simply because it's easier for the teacher to have fewer boys whinging about the chosen book when we ought to be finding a way for them to relate to a wide swath of reading material.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

And one of the reasons that it's easier is that boys have very rarely been challenged. And if we don't challenge them now, it's never going to get better. Also, it's true that a lot of the popular publishing for adults is aimed 'at women', so restricting boys to books about 'them' is doing them a huge disservice in later life.

I was told, only half jokingly, that the reason we couldn't do the black women poets collection was because one of the more 'difficult' boys in my A level class wouldn't have coped. He would have, as it was mostly an act, but no-one was willing to push him.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

(Ooh, are you in or around London on Sunday or Monday next week? I'm travelling back up from Brighton, and since I change at London anyway, I'm going to get the early train to Victoria, and then the latest train I can to Manchester. Would love to meet up with you if at all possible?)

[majea.livejournal.com]

I'll either be in the area or flat hunting in Brighton, so it should be quite easy to meet up. Yay!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I will be out of lj contact for the weekend, so if I email you my mobile number (do you use your @livejournal address?), perhaps we can contact each other at some point to see where we might be on the Monday for meeting?

[zoje-george.livejournal.com]

Could you hear me screaming from all the way over here?

Scene: New Movie for Kids Comes Out, Sam Sees Promotional Advertisement

"NOT AGAIN! WHY is it ALWAYS a little boy (fish, lion, bear whatEVER) that's going on an adventure?! WHY?! Couldn't Nemo have been a girl fish? WHY WHY WHY is it always the boys that go on adventures. No, don't give me that Pochahontas crap, no, I don't want to hear about Mulan either. ... "

Which then descends into frothing and flailing.

End Scene.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Would you like to hear about Lilo and Stitch? *runs*

[zoje-george.livejournal.com]

I'm just sayin', three movies which follow/feature girls as the main players to the usual summer landslide of kids films which follow/feature boys as the leads doesn't make up one bit. And don't get me started on the perpetuation of gender stereotyping in Lilo & Stitch.

And have you seen the commercials for Mr & Mrs Smith? There's a shot of Angie Jolie in "her" kitchen, which is secretly loaded with a ton of high tech weaponry. I said to John, "If that were OUR house, YOU'D be the one with weaponry in the kitchen."

[bouncymonkey.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday!

::twirls you around and showers you in confetti::

Hope you have a good one ;)

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

*is twirled*

[fshk.livejournal.com]

Oh, man. Why not have kids read all these books? I read The Joy Luck Club on my own in high school, but I know a lot of the middle-level English classes at my high school read it. (I was such an English lit geek that I was on good standing with enough of the teachers at school to get access to their book storage room. So I knew what everyone's assigned reading was.) I wrote so many papers in high school of the choose-a-book-from-this-list variety... I don't remember that much assigned reading beyond a Shakespeare play every year and usually two novels. And for every Jane Austen novel, we read Dickens or Lord of the Flies or *shivers* Steinbeck. Good literature should be gender neutral, no?

That didn't make a lot of sense. Gendering the books is useless. Nobody likes assigned reading in high school, even when it is good.

And I liked The Scarlet Letter when I read it. *sigh*

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

That annoyed me as well - The Scarlet Letter has human themes, not to mention great discussion points for sexuality and double standards. So naturally no-one should read it.

The problem is often getting people to see that 'male' is not gender neutral.

[zoje-george.livejournal.com]

The Scarlet Letter is always flogged in the US as the unreadable book we were all forced to read in high school. Um... I read it before that on my own, but whatever.

I've said that any book is approachable and enjoyable depending upon how it is taught. Dry teacher = dry read.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Why shouldn't girls get books that interest them?

Because girls should be punished for creating a culture of academic success despite being trivialised by society at large and getting no financial reward for it once they enter the workforce; because women teachers should be punished for taking a job that's too low-status and poorly paid for men to consider in large numbers.

Basically: girls are shit. Why on earth are they succeeding and how can we stop them?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

There's someone on the steering panel for my sister project who always takes the opportunity to ask why we're not investigating men in women-dominated fields. Oh, I can't think, perhaps it's the complete lack of female professors in the nursing and healthcare faculty, or the 50% male heads of primary schools with about 90% female teachers, or the higher pay, or maybe that they're not generally subjected to the same kinds of hostitilty and invisiblity en masse. Or that feminism really has gone Too Far, and the poor men suffer.

I once heard a phone-in on a radio show about the need for more teachers where the (male) caller wistfully said that he supposed you really couldn't pay men more to encourage them into teaching. Shame.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

Oh god, that reminds me of reading Slashdot (I know, always a mistake), and someone got offended at the suggestion that maybe it's OKAY if men are encouraged to do things like nursing or teaching, because we don't want to encourage men to go into low-paying jobs.

Brain. Explody. And nevermind that things like nursing and teaching are undervalued and low-paying BECAUSE they're traditionally women-dominated.

In short: STAB*STAB*STAB

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

One of the easiest points of my undergraduate research to explain was how women are required to identify both with men and women, while men are required only to identify with men. It was so easy to explain not because it's simple, but because most people accepted it as unquestionable fact. It is a duty of the female student to have a transitory point of view, to embody those conceptions of the feminine two. Makes me want to rip off heads left and right.

Having read both novels, I can say that they've got the wrong bead on Joy Luck Club. JLC is about both hating and loving your mother and your heritage and your mother's friends and JESUS CHRIST EVERYONE JUST FUCK OFF, which I think can definitely cause cross-gender identification.

I am a little worried about Bookslut, to tell you the truth. It's not the condescending tone, or the occasionally awfully-written reviews, it's more a sense that they haven't read the books they're denigrating. I wouldn't put Joy Luck Club and Slaughterhouse-Five in the same basket, never mind the same argument. They're not female/male opposed, they're race opposed, style opposed, time period opposed, intention opposed. Using them as parallel examples is incredibly reductive, not to mention rude, facile, and unreliable.

Whoops, you got me going. Glad to hear someone else was of the same mind as me, anyway.

[leedy.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't put Joy Luck Club and Slaughterhouse-Five in the same basket, never mind the same argument. They're not female/male opposed, they're race opposed, style opposed, time period opposed, intention opposed. Using them as parallel examples is incredibly reductive, not to mention rude, facile, and unreliable.

What she said! I was trying to figure out just why that comparison annoyed me.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Yes, they seem to like reading less than they enjoy being snotty.

And novels about women can be about the female experience, while novels about men can be about the human condition. Male is not universal!

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

I think it's the particular lack of interest in reading that irritates me. I certainly like it when people are snotty. Whatever it is, I've taken to skimming it very quickly at the beginning of the month and writing down the titles of interesting books to check out. Otherwise, ptooie.

There's a lovely book about that sort of "human universal" thing, by Elizabeth Grosz, entitled The Volatile Body. Have you read it?

Oh, and happy birthday!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it - thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks!

[jendleberry.livejournal.com]

Yes; girls are supposed to make an effort, so why shouldn't boys be expected to? The school where I did my A levels was all-boys until the sixth form, so my A level English class of 16 only had about four girls in it. We studied Carol Ann Duffy poems and the boys coped, it having been explained that as far as our teachers were concerned, if you were doing A levels it was up to you to make an effort to understand something rather than just doing what you felt like.

I think my point is that if people want boys to do better, they should make it clear that they need to make an effort, rather than implying (as the idea of making reading "relevant" and more fun does) that if they don't enjoy something they don't have to bother.

[jendleberry.livejournal.com]

P.S. Happy birthday!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[terriem.livejournal.com]

I wish I had something to add to the book debate, but I can only say that I agree with you whole-heartedly. What I really want to say is Happy Birthday! Hope you have/will have/have had a grand old day.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've had a pleasant day.

[felinitykat]

Happy birthday to you! (sorry for off-topicness -- my brain's too slow for intelligent commenting today)

But hope you've had a lovely day!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

Do you happen to be around at some point on Bank Holiday Monday? I'm going to be in London changing trains, so I thought I would spend the afternoon and evening there, if people were around to meet up.

[felinitykat]

Ooh... I've got a sneaking suspicion that G and I are at somebody's birthday party (bbq thing) that day, but I shall check.

Also, when is it that you're in London for a gig?

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to be going to to gig anymore - I worked out that that was possibly the worst time for me to have a day off. :( But if Monday's not possible, then another time surely. Come to my conference!

[felinitykat]

Oh, boo. I'll check on Monday, but alas I'm almost sure about the birthday thing. Is Monday the 30th? definitely another time, for sure.

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday :)

and the Scarlet Letter is a fab book. So there.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've not read that either (this post is turning into shameful confessions), but why dismiss it?

[whatho.livejournal.com]

I read the Scarlet Letter as an undergrad and I actually found it rather gripping. I'm not entirely sure where it got its reputation as a plodder of a read, but it doesn't seem at all deserved.

But in reference to the main point of the post, I never felt that my teachers and lecturers were striving to engage any particular group of people - simply people who wanted to learn how to engage critically with a text...any text at that. Neither boys nor girls were pandered to at any stage: 'you eat what's put in front of you 'sort of thing. The ratio of girls to boys was maybe four to one, so it's hard to say what to make of it. Austen was there; so were Milton and Stoppard. Aside from a heavy bias towards Shakespeare (from which every institution still suffers), I think they got a reasonable amount of variety in there: certainly from A-level onwards, we had dead white males and live black females on a fairly small curriculum. If a lad can't find something he likes among that lot - or can't bring himself to like Austen at any cost - I think he's being a tad picky.

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, but I've no idea where it gets the reputation either - no-one I've actually met hasn't like it.

I think that the policy is assuming an awful lot of things about "the British Boy", and doing everyone a disservice in the process. A lot of curricula are still heavily skewed away from women and minorities, and that's not seen as a problem officially.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday! (Sorry the wishes are late)

Thinking back, I think we had about as many women as men among the writers of the set texts we studied at secondary school. I can't remember much about some of the books, but we definitely had Harper Lee and Anita Desai. We seemed to cope!

[slemslempike.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

We had an all male A level list, and IIRC, all male at GCSE for the set texts, although the 'secondary' ie coursework not exam texts were sometimes by women. So I would have like to study a better balance of writers, especially race and class, which we didn't really get either, and I think, like you, most people would cope!

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I can't actually remember which of the things we read at secondary school were GCSE set texts. To Kill A Mockingbird, I think, and probably Romeo and Juliet, but I'm not sure whether there were any more. We did quite a bit of coursework, as well as exams with texts we hadn't seen before - close reading of poems, that sort of thing.

A level (at a different school, all-female class) was The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, Hamlet, As You Like It, Carol Churchill's Top Girls, Sense and Sensibility, A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, To The Lighthouse, and probably something else vaguely poetic that I can't remember at the moment. I was quite surprised that the school chose the Churchill, but women weren't excluded even without her. As it was an all female class they didn't need to even consider whether they were being too girly.

Race, on the other hand ...