#DH POCO on American Novelists - Gendergap

25 Apr 2013

The Postcolonial Digital Humanities tumbler did a great comic on this:
http://dhpoco.tumblr.com/post/48828130277/were-full-maybe-you-should-join-t
he-american

All best,
Melanie


:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Melanie Kill
Asst Professor of English
University of Maryland
2119 Tawes Hall
College Park, MD 20742

mkill(a)umd.edu  |  @melaniekill


>Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:21:36 -0700
>From: Sarah Stierch &lt;sarah.stierch(a)gmail.com&gt;
>To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects
>	&lt;gendergap(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
>Subject: [Gendergap] [PRESS] Women Novelists Wikipedia: Female Authors
>	Absent From Site's 'American Novelists' Page?
>Message-ID: &lt;51786900.50904(a)gmail.com&gt;
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
>
>
> From The Huffington Post
>
>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/women-novelists-wikipedia-female-
>authors-american_n_3149345.html
>
>Attention female authors: you may be being segregated from your male
>peers on Wikipedia. On the online encyclopedia's "American Novelists"
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_novelists> page, women
>authors are hard to find. Instead they have been filed primarily under
>"American Women Novelists."
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_women_novelists>
>
>/Vanity Fair/ contributing editor Elissa Schappell
><https://twitter.com/ElissaSchappell> made this observation and posted
>on Facebook Wednesday:
>
>    Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would
>    appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists
>    (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been
>    moved off the "American Novelists" page and into the "American
Women
>    Novelists" category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table
>    exactly--except of course--when you google "American Novelists" the
>    list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men). The
>    explanation on the pages is that the list of American Novelists is
>    too long, therefore sub-categories are necessary.
>    Idea: What about, "American Novelists with Penises" "American
>    Novelists Who Are Vastly Over-Rated and Over-Paid" or "American
>    Novelists Who Aren't Being Read But Should Be" (Here you'd find a
>    lot of women, people of color...)
>
>    Want to see where you're sitting for eternity? Take a peek.
>
>A disclaimer at the top of the American Novelists page reads, "This
>category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large.
>It should directly contain very few, if any, articles and should mainly
>contain subcategories." Schappell suggests that Wikipedia dealt with
>this space issue by moving the female authors off the page.
>
>The Huffington Post reached out to Wikipedia for a response to
>Schappell's claims but so far has not heard back.
>
>This is far from the first time that someone has expressed ire over the
>"second-class" treatment of female authors. VIDA, an organization
>dedicated to women in literary arts, pointed out that in 2011 the New
>York Times Book Review <http://www.vidaweb.org/the-2011-count> printed
>reviews of 520 male authors' books and only 273 books written by women.
>
>In a recent blog post on The Huffington Post, author Liza Palmer wrote
>about thedouble standard that exists
><http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liza-palmer/all-books-are-equal-but-s_b_313
>1794.html> in 
>the literary world:
>
>    All too often, when a woman writes a book about family and
>    relationships the reader will sigh that she felt the narrator's
>    inner monologues were "whiny" whereas when a male writer
>    contemplates these same topics he is being "introspective." If a
>    female writer uses humor in her dialogue she will be dismissed as
>    "snarky", whereas if a male writer uses humor, he has a "biting
>    wit." So called chick-lit writers get pinned with "predictable"
>    endings, while male writers writing about the same topics have
>    endings that are "satisfying."
>
>Perhaps it's time that Wikipedia realized that both men and women are
>great American novelists and should show up when you search for them.
>
>
>-- 
>/Sarah Stierch/*
>Wikimedia Foundation Program Evaluation Community Coordinator
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