On Women, Macs and Microsoft … Further Discussion Part Two

Follow-up to On Women, Macs and Microsoft … Further Discussion Part One from The Pale Cast of Thought

Further, stating that "reading gender into it is a reflection on the reader, not the author: the text itself is innocent of such crimes" points to an assumed logocentric viewpoint. This viewpoint (in relation to writing) is one which relies on authorial intent as a sort of supreme or "true" meaning of the text. The text itself IS guilty of such crimes. One does not go about "reading gender into" anti-feminist texts, the same way that one does not go about reading racism into racist jokes.

You state, "As I said elsewhere, the original audience for that post was a woman. She got the joke. It would, perhaps, help that said recipient was a lesbian, and thus my perspective (of relationships with women) was aligned with hers." AND that "the "psycho ex" comes from several of the author‘s own relationships, and he challenges anyone to assert they didn‘t happen, or to assert that they couldn‘t happen to members of any gender." Speaking of yourself in the third person is always suspicious :-) but what the author intended to express is in fact meaningless. Once a text (be that a novel, a poem, a written statement, a painting, a play, a song, a photograph etc.) reaches an audience, the author has no control over what meaning is being made of the piece he or she has produced. The multiplicity of readings and the plurality of meaning are the very reasons anyone ever studies literature. The fact that different sections of the population will note different perspectives and point out different failings or successes of a piece is the "fun" of the whole exercise.

It may very well be that "the original audience for that post was a woman. She got the joke," but the search for origins is pointless in terms of what a text means or "says" to different people. It makes no difference what either the authorial intent was or who the original audience was meant to be. In fact, there is really no need for you as the author to defend your piece of writing at all. Part of being a writer who publishes (or posts) texts for the wider public to read is coming to terms with the fact that others will critique your writings and make different points about them. What a text "means" cannot be controlled or dictated by the author. (See Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" for more on this topic…)

Third, I will not further defend my commentary on assigning feminine attributes to owned machinery. I have made my argument already and it is very clear. For you to assert that "Men do this because they personalise their ships, cars and computers, developing relationships with them that bypass ownership" is frankly, much more information than I need to know and draws mental pictures I'd rather avoid :-)

Lastly (phew)...I take issue with your tendency (and that of others) to refer to "feminists" as being part of some sort of homogeneous group with a consensus of opinion. The reality is quite different. I and many, many other academic feminists certainly would not agree that "This standard, of course, is never applied to feminist comedy. Mysandrony is just payback" as you say (did you mean "misandry?"). I think you need to do some reading within feminist critical theory or gender studies in general if this is really what you think.

Joanna Jameson : 03 Jun 2004 13:17 |  Tags: Critical Theory |  Comments (4) |  Report a problem