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Sunday 20 February 2022

On “representative narratives” and sensitivity readers

Earlier this month I wrote a blog post called “What turns me on”, about what I look for when reading and what I most value in literature. Himadri of Argumentative Old Git has now joined in and written about the subject. His essay is so good that I wondered what’s the point of blogging for me, but I want to highlight this passage: 

“To cut to the chase, I find myself turned off by what are often described as “representative narratives”. I find myself frankly disturbed when novels advertise themselves as “representative” of some marginalised voice. Like, say, the “immigrant experience”. I myself am an immigrant, having come to Britain from India aged 5, some 57 or so years ago now, and yes, I like to think I have my own voice. But what does the “immigrant experience” actually mean? Immigrants from different parts of the world will have different experiences, and hence, different voices. Even immigrants from the same part of the world will have different experiences depending on their social background, the role they fulfil in the country they have come into, the part of the country they live in, and so on, and so forth. And even if the experiences of two immigrants are exactly the same, their voices still won’t be the same, simply because they are two different individuals. And this, I think, is an important point. Whatever the background of the character, whatever minority or majority they may belong to, however marginalised or centralised they may be, each character is, and should be depicted as, an individual.”

This is something that often irritates me: when some self-proclaimed progressives suggest that Shakespeare or the Western canon is not relevant to non-white people like me, and want to include books by writers of different races in the curriculum in order to help all students feel represented, as though any book by an Asian writer would naturally reflect my life or my views. It is patronising and insulting.

Among Viet people, even if you think in terms of groups instead of individuals, the experiences of Viet immigrants in the UK and Brits of Viet descent are different, the experiences of Northerners and Southerners are different, the experiences of boat people and new political refugees and immigrants and undocumented immigrants are different, etc. It is deeply offensive to suggest that I would relate to, and feel represented by, some character in a book just because the character or the author is Asian. It is even more offensive to imply that, because I’m Asian, Shakespeare is not for me.

I probably don’t need to say I think #DisruptTexts is a scam. It’s not about diversity, and definitely not about literature. #DisruptTexts is a scam created and promoted by teachers who can’t teach Shakespeare and don’t know anything about literature, who want to replace classic texts with books that are easier to teach—that’s why they want to replace Western classic texts with contemporary fiction, especially YA, rather than classic works by non-white writers.

This leads to the related subject of sensitivity readers. I find it baffling and frankly depressing that so many people call themselves bookish and support the notion of sensitivity readers. I don’t want someone else to speak for me just because we happen to belong to the same group. I don’t want someone else to decide on my behalf what might offend my sensibilities. I don’t want someone else to tamper with a novelist’s choice of phrases or characterisation just because it’s not politically correct.

There are, I’ve noticed, often two main defences for sensitivity readers. One is that there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that another group is depicted accurately—this is a strawman, as this is not the reason people object to sensitivity readers, and it’s not what sensitivity readers are about. Even if you argue that the job of sensitivity readers is to make sure that a character is not a stereotype, things can get complicated—for example, I know a Chinese woman who deceived and manipulated a Western guy for a visa, so if I wrote a memoir and wrote about her, I would be accused of perpetuating a stereotype about Chinese or Asian women, but the story is true.  

A second defence is that it’s not censorship, the sensitivity reader has no power and only makes suggestions. This is true for now, but I have heard people say that writers shouldn’t have to bear the costs of hiring sensitivity readers and publishers instead should, and considering the state of things, publishers may make it standard practice to hire sensitivity readers so as to prevent backlash and save money in the future. But even if hiring sensitivity readers doesn’t become compulsory, it’s irrelevant because it’s not my reason for opposing sensitivity readers—whether or not they have real power, I do not want someone else to speak on my behalf what might offend me.  

Kate Clanchy has recently written about the subject, “How sensitivity readers corrupt literature”. As expected, different sensitivity readers take issue with different phrases or passages, as people after all don’t have the same ideas about what is offensive. Some go further, suggesting replacing words with something more politically correct or more “inclusive”: 

“I should not use “disfigure” of a landscape (infraction level 3, as presumably comparing bings — spoil heaps — to boils might be harmful to acne sufferers). Nor should I use “handicap” in its ordinary sense of “impede” (infraction level 2, serious); and I should prefer the acronym “SEN” to its origin phrase, special educational needs, because it is more inclusive (infraction level 2).”

This isn’t good for literature.    

It is a sad state of affairs to see writers ask for sensitivity readers, and readers accept them.  

19 comments:

  1. The Kate Clanchy tweet stream was good, and this post is also very strong. Most appealing.

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  2. The one essential quality needed by a writer (as it is for a singer) is fearlessness. Without it no other virtues are worth anything. When you ask me to read your book, you're asking me to give you irreplaceable hours out of my LIFE. If you're not confident in the worth of what you have to say and in your ability to say it, why should I be?

    I will never read a book that I know was submitted to a sensitivity reader.

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  3. The one thing I would add to this is that almost all literature of value, really until the last sixty years or so, was produced under a censorship regime. In the U.S. and U.K. this regime was run privately (as opposed to a regime where works are submitted to a censor), with authors and publishers expected to stay within whatever the bounds happen to be.

    Pre-code vs. Hayes code Hollywood is the most blatant, famous example, but literature was subject to - subjected itself to - the same constraints.

    The curious thing about the sensitivity reader phenomenon is that as far as I can tell there is no governmental pressure at all. The censors are just social media mobs.

    But the essential quality of literature cannot, empirically, be "fearlessness." Elizabethan playwrights and Victorian novelists alike policed themselves. And, from other literatures, I read works submitted to censors all the time. All of Dostoevsky, al of Tolstoy, was submitted to a censor.

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  4. I agree, literature throughout history has been produced under a censorship regime, censorship is nothing new.
    The "new" thing here is that sensitivity readers and social media mobs act like censors and cause self-censorship in writers, but deny it, and they're very dishonest about what they do.

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  5. Of course countless authors have had to submit to various forms of censorship and oversight, but to take the chances of speaking in such situations (to assume that you nevertheless have the right to speak) seems to me to be courageous at the least, especially if you aspire to produce anything other than party line boilerplate.

    "Out of the millions of available voices, you should stop and listen to ME." Fearless? Perhaps a better word would be arrogant...which might be another way of saying such writers have an innate authority that neither they nor we ever doubt, whatever external strictures they are compelled to operate under. Whatever the quality, it's what I require as a reader, and what self-submission to sensitivity mavens tells me is lacking.

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  6. I don't see how these claims about arrogance and innate authority, a term I admit I do not understand at all, do not logically apply to all writers. Thomas Hardy self-submitted, Dostoevsky and Dickens self-submitted. I'm not giving them up. The Vizetellys self-submitted when they translated Zola, but misjudged the constraint and paid for it.

    Rochester, Sade, Chernyshevsky, Lawrence, those guys kicked back. I want to save "courageous" for writers like them, even is they drive me nuts.

    Avoid big publishers is one lesson I've drawn from the sensitivity fiasco.

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    1. Clearly you and I are two ships that pass in the night. I wish you a profitable journey!

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  7. This is a very poignant post and I'm glad you wrote about sensitivity readers. What astonishes me is that, as other have commented, yes, literature has always been subjected to a form of censorship, that was carried out by an authority with the aim of safeguarding public morality or public order. Now this self-proclaimed moral authority (not run by the State, but coinciding with an entity made of publishing houses, authors and social media mob) ascribes to itself the power to jugde on the matter of sensitivity, which is sumpremely subjective and personal, and doing so it exercises a power that is abstractly limitless and potentially pervasive (because there will always be someone who's offended by a thought, a phrase, an image) and imposing to all the view of a restricted circle of people.

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    1. I think soon publishers are going to make it standard practice to employ sensitivity readers, just because that would cost much less than withdrawing a title.
      But in my head, it's more likely to happen to something like YA than what is stupidly called literary fiction.

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  8. Right, I take the overthrow of - minimization of - the censorship regime in the 1960s as a real achievement, a big increase in artistic freedom which definitely included a greater freedom to be offensive. It is saddening that so many people in the arts want to undo that achievement.

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    1. It is saddening, and honestly I don't get it.
      One thing I find curious is that, from what I've seen, lots of sensitivity readers are fiction writers, which means that they act as readers/ judges/ censors (whatever you call them) of the works of their competitors. Isn't that strange?

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    2. Yes, at some point there will be a scandal where a corrupt sensitivity reader deliberately destroys an enemy's book. That will make some good gossip.

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  9. The whole thing is driven by money. Books are not art; they are product, and publishers are businesses that sell books--the objects themselves, not the ideas of the writers--in order to make profits. These sensitivity readers are just a form of product focus groups, to make publishers' products more palatable to a larger customer base. In the meanwhile, there are small, independent publishers who are not following the bland fast-food approach to books. The downside of that is that many of these indie publishers are fighting over the same small demographics, and almost every indie publisher has a very narrow interest. It is hard for a novel that does not follow current genre conventions or address a current social issue to find a way into the public eye, so there is a great deal of filtering in place even without these anonymous readers. Of course the sensitivity readers have a place in the publishing world because there have been recent novels that were attacked on social media for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the novels as novels, and publishers have lost some sizeable investments into publicizing the books. This looks like a cheap way for publishers to convince themselves that they can avoid such problems in the future. It's greed, is all it is. Capitalism at work. In mainstream publishing, "a good book" is a book that sells a lot of units; it is not a statement of any other values than profitability. Anyway, this is just a passing fad.

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    1. I agree that the whole thing is driven by money. The sensitivity reader thing, the way I see it, is no more than a grift.
      I also think it's a passing fad, though how long is going to be around, and how much is it going to destroy during that time?
      As far as I know, however, sensitivity readers are now mostly hired by the writers themselves, not the publishers.

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    2. Well that is nuts. I guess these writers think that having been sensitivity-read will make their novels more palatable to literary agents and acquisitions editors. Which, I am certain, is not true at all.

      American fiction is extremely limited as is, in regard to subject matter and style, and genre fiction, especially YA, is even more restrictive in terms of allowable cliches and worldview. For the longest time, one of the biggest American science fiction publishers had a very strong and unapologetic libertarian/conservative bent, and people like China Meiville would never have gotten a book deal from them. There's still an ongoing backlash against the rise of female and queer SF writers. So certainly voices of all types are constantly being filtered out of the arts. I am pretty well convinced that, in America anyway, the best novels being written right now will never be published by anyone, because they are not "timely, relatable, or universally appealing." Or whatever. I am pushing the conversation sideways, sorry. There is a great deal of repression in society at large, all over the world, and nobody really knows what to do about it. Questions of equality and equity have no easy answers, and these issues spill over into the strangest places, like memoir publishing. The responses to these social issues might sometimes be ludicrous and even harmful, but the issues themselves, I am convinced, are certainly important. Sometimes I rail that I am too old and white and off-topic to get a book deal, but I try to take myself in hand and remind myself that I have, in the end, no actual right to a publishing contract. Blah blah blah, I am rambling now like an old man.

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    3. "I guess these writers think that having been sensitivity-read will make their novels more palatable to literary agents and acquisitions editors. Which, I am certain, is not true at all."
      I agree, it's definitely not true. I believe this was mostly a thing in YA, then it spread to other genres.

      "I am pretty well convinced that, in America anyway, the best novels being written right now will never be published by anyone, because they are not "timely, relatable, or universally appealing." Or whatever."
      I guess, but I don't read much contemporary literature so I don't know.

      "Questions of equality and equity have no easy answers, and these issues spill over into the strangest places, like memoir publishing. The responses to these social issues might sometimes be ludicrous and even harmful, but the issues themselves, I am convinced, are certainly important."
      I think the issues are serious, but the trendy movements tend to focus on non-issues: words, or things that don't really matter. For example, there were lots of anti-Asian attacks in the US last year, many elderly Asian Americans were attacked from behind, unprovoked, and some died as a consequence. That is a serious problem. But I came across articles about so-called cultural approriation in food, linking it to hate and to the anti-Asian attacks. That is trivial, and frankly offensive.
      I can't help thinking that a lot of the discourse about race or "marginalised groups" or whatever is like that: performative, trivial, pointless, helping nobody. It's like that with sensitivity readers and the idea that some descriptions or phrases in a book "cause harm".
      Give me a fucking break.

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  10. DANG this post is gold.

    I think what bugs me about the sensitivity thing is...it undermines the universality of being human? Because yes, different backgrounds mean different experiences and different ways of looking at the world. But as you say so well here, that goes for any individual. NO person is identical to any other person. But also, EVERY person is fundamentally similar to every other person by virtue of sharing the same human nature. When writers are pressured to consult sensitivity readers, they're being sent this message that there's an impenetrable barrier between their group and another group--that they can't possibly connect with an individual with a different background on an imaginative level. Even though connecting with individuals of diverse backgrounds on an imaginative level is a writer's JOB.

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    1. Yeah. On twitter I had to say it over and over again, to push back against the stupid, divisive idea that I would only feel represented by books by Asian authors or books that feature Asian characters, and that works of the Western canon wouldn't be relevant or relatable to me. I don't know how people can support such things and think they're being progressive.

      Tolstoy wrote about an Avar rebel in Hadji Murad, and it's a masterpiece. Writing about another group, especially a group with a different culture, is certainly difficult, but not impossible.

      You know what else I hate? All those groups, subreddits, twitter accounts about "men write women". Sure, those passages are atrocious, but what those people have to do is read better books. There are plenty of male writers who can write women well. It's not impossible. It's not even rare.

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