Cassie you are the best and I chuckled many times reading this. You’re so smart and I love your words. Ty for sharing!! Going to be thinking of my three words all day today
Thank you so much for sharing this information and doing it in such an engaging manner. You've given me much to think about, and I LOVE the publicity exercises.
Thank you for this! When I read your initial meditation on mainstream publishing's fear of breaking out of a certain white female market, I think of the term "marginalized communities." The term implies that the "marginalized" are this tiny, homogenous group of people, on the margins of the mainstream, with not enough money to spend on hardcover books. Yet demographically the "marginalized" are actually an enormous group of people, clamoring for a vibrant, creative, nourishing collection of texts.
When I read the Times, NYMag, The New Yorker, I feel shunted into this category of "white woman reader" that does not in fact represent me, my identities, my politics. But I consume these "intellectual" publications because I am interested in art, politics, culture, power, privilege, climate, economics . . . and every day I think to myself: "I want to be reading intellectually sophisticated, and politically inspiring, and new world creating ideas, written by people who are *not* already granted power and prestige through Whiteness and status.
I know that I can find that writing, and I am always in search of it. But having to "search" for the ideas that I crave, and at the same time be flooded with an ocean of writing that reflects a very narrow frame of reference, can seduce me into believing that the consensus of mainstream publishing is to continue to recirculate one particular world view as "representative" of the whole, save in the sphere of identity politics, where the "marginalized" are so often asked to center their personal experience in relation to their ideas, in order to be published.
So if this is how I feel, as a "white woman reader," it makes me think there must be others like me out there. Which introduces another question: what if publishing is actually misunderstanding the needs of white women readers? What if white women readers don't just want books that reflect our own needs/wants/desires back to ourselves? What if we are working to de-center the power of Whiteness in our own lives and don't want to have to continually read books that reinforce the fiction that we are the demographic that reads?
Cassie you are the best and I chuckled many times reading this. You’re so smart and I love your words. Ty for sharing!! Going to be thinking of my three words all day today
Thank you so much for sharing this information and doing it in such an engaging manner. You've given me much to think about, and I LOVE the publicity exercises.
Thank you for this! When I read your initial meditation on mainstream publishing's fear of breaking out of a certain white female market, I think of the term "marginalized communities." The term implies that the "marginalized" are this tiny, homogenous group of people, on the margins of the mainstream, with not enough money to spend on hardcover books. Yet demographically the "marginalized" are actually an enormous group of people, clamoring for a vibrant, creative, nourishing collection of texts.
When I read the Times, NYMag, The New Yorker, I feel shunted into this category of "white woman reader" that does not in fact represent me, my identities, my politics. But I consume these "intellectual" publications because I am interested in art, politics, culture, power, privilege, climate, economics . . . and every day I think to myself: "I want to be reading intellectually sophisticated, and politically inspiring, and new world creating ideas, written by people who are *not* already granted power and prestige through Whiteness and status.
I know that I can find that writing, and I am always in search of it. But having to "search" for the ideas that I crave, and at the same time be flooded with an ocean of writing that reflects a very narrow frame of reference, can seduce me into believing that the consensus of mainstream publishing is to continue to recirculate one particular world view as "representative" of the whole, save in the sphere of identity politics, where the "marginalized" are so often asked to center their personal experience in relation to their ideas, in order to be published.
So if this is how I feel, as a "white woman reader," it makes me think there must be others like me out there. Which introduces another question: what if publishing is actually misunderstanding the needs of white women readers? What if white women readers don't just want books that reflect our own needs/wants/desires back to ourselves? What if we are working to de-center the power of Whiteness in our own lives and don't want to have to continually read books that reinforce the fiction that we are the demographic that reads?