Where are the Women?

On Representation, and why it Matters Less than we Think

This week has held events I had hoped, as the Hobbits say, not to have seen in my day. I have taken some comfort from these gentle, unprepared creatures. In fact, I’ve taken more comfort from them than I would have expected.

I started this substack on a whim, but there was a deeper need that lay underneath it. It is a need that relates to a sadness I am still trying to track. It is easy to say that it is “pandemic related”, but this is not quite right. The truth is I have lost many things that I loved, and that I cannot get them back.

After years of having small children close at hand, they are now absent during the day. After years of charting my time by semesters and the dear companionship of students, I lost them too. And then there are the innumerable things the pandemic took from us that cannot be replaced. Mine were not the noticeable, devastating losses of illness and death. Lost were irreplaceable field trips, classroom outings, Christmas concerts and childhood rights of passage. I lost an entire semester of teaching, of students who have now scattered who I will never again know in one room.

I lost holding a newborn nephew, my brother’s first. I lost an entire year of greeting the teachers who I sent my children to every morning. I lost a dog, my faithful writing companion, but never spoke of it. It felt too small a loss to name in the midst of so much that was louder. But she was a good dog, and I miss her.

I lost at least a dozen dahlias, new to me varieties I’d carefully selected, after an uncommon early soaking rain. They had sprouts when I placed them in the ground but they were lost to the deluge. I will not see their colors or shapes in the afternoon sun. I had carefully researched and purchased those expensive tubers in the depths of a pandemic winter. The delight of last summer’s cutting garden carried with it this loss, the colors that will not coexist, the ones I will never know. It nearly broke my heart to not see them bloom. After the longest years, I am starting to count these losses. Separately they are small but together they are heavy.

What I lost, also, was the ability to read. Calling oneself a “voracious reader” can feel like a self-aggrandizing move, but of me it was often true. I am an indiscriminate reader, profligate in my tastes. I love Scandanavian crime fiction and also poetry, children’s picture books and Biblical commentaries. I love books about nature and cultural theory and Native American history. I read four or five books at a time, switching back and forth between the theology I read for work and the books I read just because. But during the pandemic, I lost the ability to read almost entirely. Besides a handful of books I read for work, I read no fiction for over a year.

The loss of fiction in particular was an acute loss for me. I live in the world, as I’ve written, somewhat uncomfortably. I think I sink into it a bit deeper than others. I do not get lost in busyness and hurry as many write about; I get lost instead in slowness, in retrospection, in looking at a seed and pondering its origin. I have almost hyperfocus on ideas, on questions, on possibilities, on the inside of my own head. For this reason, stories are very important to me. I need the stories of other, different people to help me understand my own experience. Someone else’s sadness, finely described, can help me understand my own. The love of a man, cleverly narrated, can root me again in my own marriage. The story of an immigrant can help me imagine what it would be like to be entirely unknown in the world. The experience of reading such varied different accounts takes me out of the narcissism I am prone to and reminds me that I am only as alone in the world as I decide to be.

I decided to read Lord of the Rings because I thought perhaps reading something so utterly different might bring back my ability to read. This story is not one that I have any immediate reference to. I am not a Hobbit, I do not live in the Shire, I do not know the story of the Ring nor do I speak Elvish nor do I know anything about Elves. Perhaps by encountering such a strange world I could regain one of the things I have lost- the imaginative sympathy with others that I need to live well in the world, to properly consider where I find myself after such a year.

One thing I have noticed as I have read is that there are few women in this first book.[2] There is Goldberry, Tom Bombadil’s wife, who exists in the quiet comfort of their home but contributes little to the story. There is also Arwen, one of the Elves who at this point in the story has contributed little to the plot.

As I told you last week, I have long been a student of feminist thought, and I have often found its conceptions lacking. One of the concerns I mull over is the constant refrain that “representation matters”. I have often wondered what this means and whether it is always true.

In one way, it is clear that representation is a good. I have always sought out female teachers and mentors, and now friends and colleagues when possible. There is something irreplaceable about the company of women for me as a woman, and I find that it is easier to participate as a professional when there are other women also doing so. It is without question valuable for people of color and other underrepresented minorities to see others who share part of their background participating at high levels in various institutions. It offers a kind of imaginative possibility for them to follow. It can give voice to an aspect of the human experience that is often ignored. This is unquestionably good.

I was told once that the University of Cambridge carefully selects which photographs of its famous benefactors to display in order to encourage parity between the genders. Research, I am told, demonstrates that women perform better when images of men and women are displayed equally on the walls of such institutions.

Maybe this is true, I cannot say. But I do worry about an emphasis on “representation” from time to time. I worry that “representation” can come to mean “looking for only those stories that sound like my own.” I worry about thinning material support for difference into whose pictures appear on a wall. I worry about it because it seems to flatten the value of imaginatively engaging with those who are different from us. One of the great possibilities of literature is living in another world, in someone else’s shoes. But it is, by my read, at least as important to value difference as it is to look for images of ourselves. Mutual flourishing may in fact be better realized when we recognize the irreducible particularity of each of us, differing differently one from another.

To thin the question of difference to whose pictures are displayed on a wall, or which characters appear in a book, thins also the possibility of us each engaging our own discrete particularities, the ways we differ within those groups that identify us as the same.

Women are different from men, but also each individual woman differs one from another in ways that are perhaps more substantial than the ways in which they are the same. Further, the idea that a situation, or a room, or a story is lacking because women are not included in it seems silly, and the idea that women would do traditionally male-occupations differently than men is insulting in its own right. I was once asked if as a woman I had a “different perspective on the problem of evil”- I still do not know what this question means. What, exactly, would my experience as a woman contribute to such a question? Would it not be better simply to ask what I, as Kirsten, thought of it? Such groupings, intended to promote difference, often flatten it at the expense of articulating the true, raucous, radically weird and troubling and wild ways we do in fact inhabit the world differently. I don’t think “as a woman”, I think as myself.

Such observations are often taken to almost preposterous extremes, such as the example below. Does anyone truly believe that wartime negotiations between Ukraine and Russia would be substantially altered if women were in the room? In order for this to be true, men would either have to be substantially deficient, or women significantly competent in ways that are currently lacking by men. Are we truly simple enough to believe in a time of war, where (mostly) men are fighting valiantly to protect their freedom, the mere existence of a woman at a negotiating table would make a marked difference?

Representation matters, yes. It matters particularly if your bookshelf currently contains only one kind of person- but if it does, you are a boring reader and have other problems. Read everything, promote the writings of people who are different from you in all kinds of ways. Diversify your bookshelves, absolutely- but do it in order to encounter difference, not simply to see yourself in print. Don’t rule out stories because they lack people who look like you. And please don’t oversell your contribution based on gender alone. You are likely less important than you imagine.

---

[1] (Tish Harrison Warren apparently lost hers as well, as she writes about here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/opinion/reading-grief.html).

[2] I mentioned to my husband my topic for this week and he said, “Just wait! Someone new is about to appear!” but I am writing this anyway.