Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers

https://reason.com/2022/07/05/rise-of-the-sensitivity-reader/

by mikhael • 4 years ago

65 37 4 years ago

reason.com

gatvol• 4 years ago

This is how human culture stops evolving.

Sebguer2• 4 years ago

By listening to other people's experiences?

atypicaluser2• 4 years ago

Well... yes. The main work described in the article is a work of fiction. i.e. a work of imagination, which means the author listens to his own inner muse. The protagonist is fiction, his experiences are fiction, his story is fiction. Lies, simply, but (if we're lucky) entertaining lies. The author is under no obligation to listen to others (especially their 'truths',) and may in fact harm his work by listening to others rather than trust his own sense of story. If he's an obligation to anyone, it'll be to the buying (and reading) public who'll decide the fate of his work.

defrost• 4 years ago

I guess we learnt all we needed to know about the native central north american experience by watching the Hollywood depiction of Tonto?

No need to to better, in your mind at least?

atypicaluser2• 4 years ago

In answer to your second question: no, not really. The only thing to learn is that, like a certain North Pole elf, Tonto is a work of fiction. As is the Lone Ranger. As are all the bad guys they hunted, the sheriffs they met, the girls they wooed. Even the silver bullets came out of someone else's imagination.

psyc4• 4 years ago

I see there are already multiple people busy Motte N Baileying you. Don't you like goodness and light, gatvol? Why don't you like progress, gatvol? Why? All we're asking for is good. What's wrong with good?

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

Oh! Well human "progress" may stop. Because progress is directed and has a goal.

Whose progress now?

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

Evolution, like human culture, is not directed, but an emergent status quo.

I bet we'll keep having those.

MrMember• 4 years ago

Known as sensitivity readers, or sometimes authenticity readers, consultants like Sally are a growing part of publishing, hired to correct the pre-publication missteps of authors who don't share the same traits—or "lived experience," to use a favored buzzword—as their characters.

Sounds like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Write what you know and you'll get crucified for a lack of diversity. Write outside your race, gender, or lived experienced and you'll get crucified for it too.

Sebguer2• 4 years ago

How do you come to this conclusion from the quoted paragraph?

The literal entire point is to help enable people who are writing outside their race, gender, and lived experience to write convincingly.

_vertigo• 4 years ago

This was discussed in the article.

Within the writing community, the practice was more complicated. In theory, sensitivity readers were a way to write outside your identity without causing offense by "getting it wrong." But the emerging consensus, especially in Y.A., was that it was even more wrong to stray outside your lane in the first place. In a particularly revealing 2018 feature on the culture website Vulture, a sought-after sensitivity reader expressed profound contempt for the authors whose manuscripts she was paid to vet.

kixiQu• 4 years ago

The comment does reflect the conclusion the article comes to. (I myself do disagree with the article and believe that there is a good function these readings perform, but the replied-to comment is certainly in line with the piece and website's whole...deal)

HonestOp001• 4 years ago

This is why anonymity is the future for good writing. You need to have disposable avatars that you build up a email list with, then be nimble to move on.

ttyprintk• 4 years ago

That is, in fact, what the Filipino-American writer chose. The option proffered by the sensitivity reader was to assign race to characters.

crackercrews2• 4 years ago

A business opportunity! There is an increasing number of authors who want to publish anonymously, but many publishers do not work this way. Create a publishing house specializing in anonymous or pseudonymous authors.

An academic journal with this model recently launched: The Journal Of Controversial Ideas. [1]

1: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/

BuyMyBitcoins• 4 years ago

A compelling idea, yet I worry that the authors who go this route will once again be stymied when activists demand that major booksellers stop carrying works from such a problematic publisher.

ch4s36• 4 years ago

The recent Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie (editor at large) featuring author George Dawes Green[1] had a brief discussion about Green's publisher hiring a sensitivity reader. Green discusses his fear going into the interaction based on what he had heard from other writers and seen online. However, his reader loved his book and had thoughtful notes that he was able to use to tighten up a character and make her more believable. He come away thinking that it's a potentially useful tool if the author, publisher, and reader come into the interaction in good faith.

[1]https://reason.com/podcast/2022/08/05/george-dawes-green-why...

[*Edit] If you're into literature, or are a fan of Southern writers at all, the linked podcast episode is really worth a listen, even if you don't care for libertarians or Nick Gillespie in particular. George Dawes Green is really interesting to listen to.

seibelj3• 4 years ago

Nick Gillespie is one of the finest interviewers currently working. The quality of his conversations is excellent and he is a first-rate intellectual that has deep knowledge of the western canon.

ch4s36• 4 years ago

He’s also a really interesting character if you’re ever in New York and have a chance to catch him in person. He’s really fun to talk to about. Wide range of topics.

His obsession with Zardoz seems unhealthy though.

batmanturkey• 4 years ago

Let’s just ditch this whole “fiction” thing. It will be easier.

One can also challenge ideas. One doesn’t have to just bend over and accept intellectually unsound notions as “cultural appropriation” lying down. Respond: “like the alphabet? Foreign foods? The issue wasn’t copying Native American bread recipes, but rather killing them and stealing their land.

Am I required to eat certain foods and listen to certain music based upon my genetic heritage?

Feeding the hard right red meat is the devils work. I’m all for human rights and respect for others and not trying to presume to know how others live or think. Identity politics is the gateway drug by which the right wing wins hearts and minds. Drop the identity politics emphasis and support the “all sorts of humans are humans with equal rights to yourself” angle. That’s what any humanist ideology must do in 2022

ttpphd• 4 years ago

This is just a different imagining of the role of editor. Everyone who writes well has an editor. People really will invent reasons to be mad.

crackercrews2• 4 years ago

When The Men, Sandra Newman's sci-fi novel in which everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly vanishes from the face of the earth, came under fire for what critics termed the "transphobic" implication that people with Y chromosomes are men, one of the chief questions was whether the author had engaged a trans sensitivity reader.

Could movies like Children of Men be made today? Would it be seen as anti-trans because it doesn't account for trans men? It's one thing to say there is sex and there is also gender. But the current trend is toward denying sex and only ever talking about gender.

psyc4• 4 years ago

Denying the validity of the concept of sex, on color-of-medical grounds, is ubiquitous (online anyway) by now.

I had a brief and unsettling flash-forward earlier. Twenty brief years have passed, and I'm a card carrying senior citizen. The way that the young speak is the good and enlightened way to speak. The prevailing ideology is no longer comprehensible to me. I still think of myself as a good, compassionate, and open minded person, the same as I was when I was their age.

But that was the past. I'm the past. I'm the Boomer now. I'm the bad old days when people considered the unthinkable normal. How could we have? And why are we still in power in Washington, anyway? The world will be a better place when my generation and our dated ideas have shuffled off to keep company with all the other ignorant oppressors of the past. I wasn't always, but time moved on and yes, I'm the bad guy. I'm the problem.

It was the weirdest feeling. Like deja vu or trying to remember a dream that's fading.

zarzavat• 4 years ago

It only seems ubiquitous because you read the internet in English. People talking in Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, Indonesian, Yoruba are talking about other issues.

Even in English it's a highly controversial issue, that's why people like to talk about it so much. People rarely talk about things that everybody agrees on, there's less to say.

kurupt213• 4 years ago

This is horrible. A flood of boring, sterile books incoming.

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

Well good. Because being a gatekeeper, no matter how nice it seems ideally, is a huge PITA in reality. Serves them right!

Now make it hard for them, everyone!

cdev_gl• 4 years ago

The film Arrival (2016) is well known for hiring consultants- experts in linguistics, other scientists, even Stephen Wolfram- to improve its portrayal of an alien language and the people working to decipher it.

Nobody complains when a consultant is hired in this capacity, and yet sensitivity readers, whose role is broadly similar, are somehow considered bad? It's not like they rewrite your whole book- they offer notes for things that don't make sense given the characters and plot, just as a developmental editor might.

A publisher doesn't just print the text they're given, they edit it, suggesting changes they believe will help it be better (and thus sell better). There's a back and forth dialog between editors and authors, and it's entirely possible either side might walk away if there's no willingness to compromise. This happens to all books that aren't self-published. Adding another type of editor to the mix isn't gatekeeping.

hombre_fatal• 4 years ago

The article already brings compared those consultants with sensitivity readers.

Sensitivity Readers Are the New Literary Gatekeepers

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