Abstract
The catalyst for this editorial is the pleasure I had reading a book by the well-known feminist theorist Lauren Berlant entitled Desire/Love (2012). The book is a brilliant and beautifully written essay in which the author playfully explores, explains and unravels the differences between two passionate experiences. To me, it was clearly the accomplishment of a seasoned scholar who was on top of the material and had plenty of insights to offer on the topics in question. It was, therefore, to my great surprise – and, I must admit, irritation - that the book was presented on the flap text as an ‘introductory essay with undergraduates and non-specialists in mind’.
Of course, flap texts are geared toward selling books to as many people as possible. Moreover, there is nothing inherently negative about writing for an audience of undergraduates and non-specialists – and, indeed, I will be arguing that that is precisely how we should be writing. However, the blurb bothered me. To begin with, it made me wonder about the author’s earlier texts, which had been decidedly less reader-friendly than this one. If she could write like this, why hadn’t she done so in those texts as well? Does this mean that feminist theorists should reserve their best writing for undergraduates, while giving more veteran scholarly readers a hard time? More importantly, the blurb seemed to be sending the message that the more you enjoy reading a text, the less seriously you will be taken as a scholar. In other words, an author has to apologize for or, at least, justify, writing clearly and engagingly, lest it reflects unfavourably on her more ‘serious’ theoretical scholarship. Moreover, the reader is instructed to regard her enjoyment of the text as a guilty pleasure, thereby robbing her of all sophistication and reducing her in one fell swoop to the lowly status of ‘undergraduate’.
All of this resonates with the myriad instances I have encountered of highly regarded theorists brushing off complaints that their writing styles are too convoluted with the rejoinder that theory is difficult and that audiences should be prepared to work hard in order to understand it. This attitude is reflected in how high theory is written and presented to audiences. I remember, for example, an international gender studies conference I attended several years ago, where one of the invited speakers, well-known and greatly admired in the field, began her talk by warning the audience that what she was about to present would be so complex that those of us who felt they were not up to it should feel free to leave the room then and there! Unsurprisingly, we in the audience all remained frozen in our seats as no one was willing to risk the shame of admitting that she had doubts about being able to follow the speaker’s lofty sentiments. Not to mention that after the talk was over, no one had the courage to raise a critical question for fear of openly showing her own failure to grasp sophisticated scholarship.
[What’s wrong with this picture?]
I would like to argue here that there is such a thing as good (and, by implication, bad) writing. Good writing is engaging, clear, well-argued and a pleasure to read; while bad writing is dense, opaque, hard to follow and a chore to read. Academic writing is presumably aimed at communicating knowledge and, therefore, benefits from good writing. However, these aims are all too often subsumed under the struggle for power which is ubiquitous to contemporary academic life. Writing is a means of gaining status in the scientific community, separating the most valued and prestigious at the top from the more lowly rank-and-file at the bottom. Who gets published and in which journals and by which publishers, as well as which authors are cited and whose work is the subject of scholarly debate and exegesis – all are matters involving power. Despite its commitment to egalitarian relations and emancipatory knowledge, gender studies is no exception to this.
In a path-breaking article launching the journal Feminist Theory, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise (2000) expressed their concern about what they saw as a troubling development within gender studies, whereby theory was treated as the specialized preserve of a priestly caste of ‘theory stars’ rather than as an activity in which all feminist researchers should be engaged. In their view, this process has led to the unfortunate canonization of a particular kind of theory as ‘good’ feminist theory. ‘Good’ feminist theory is meta-theory. It is not grounded in the analysis of material, social and cultural practices, but rather highly abstract, obscure and full of impenetrable jargon. Because such theory requires explanation, simplification and interpretation in order to be understandable for the lesser mortals among us (i.e. the undergraduates, non-specialists…), a separation is created between those who ‘do’ theory and those who struggle to understand it.
It is here that the proverbial plot begins to thicken. What if bad writing is less a matter of not knowing how to write well, but that writing well – that is, in simple, clear language, rather than pretentious concepts and overly complicated prose – is penalized? Could it be that the writer who writes with an eye toward taking her reader by the hand runs the risk of appearing less impressive, theoretically speaking, than her more deliberately obscure colleague? The sociologist Michael Billig (2013) provides some interesting insights into the phenomenon of bad writing in Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, a book which is, parenthetically, delightful to read. He argues that academics have been trained to use ‘puffed up words’ instead of everyday language. They are encouraged to name-drop as a way to show their theoretical colours rather than write engagingly about theory. Obfuscating language allows them to avoid responsibility for what they have written (‘it might be implied’, ‘it could be argued’). The unfortunate result of this kind of (bad) academic writing is that theorists don’t have to go that extra mile to clarify what they really mean and can instead produce incomprehensible prose for an audience who has learned to accept this as the way scholarly writing should be. Billig goes on to champion the use of simple language, the avoidance of pretentious writing, and, above all, the author’s taking responsibility for being as clear as s/he possibly can. In this vein, he concludes that scholars should not be writing more simply because they need to address a general public, but rather that they should be addressing their fellow specialists more simply. As he puts it, if your ideas fail to survive the process of being translated into ordinary language or seem to lose their shine, then this should not be taken as a sign that they are just too difficult for the masses to understand, but rather that they were, perhaps, not so special in the first place (Billig, 2013: 212).
Inspired by Stanley and Wise’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with feminist theory and Billig’s recommendations for how to improve it, I would suggest that we need to rethink our priorities concerning ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing in gender studies.
First, I think we need to reject the notion that good theory is, by definition, so complex that the uninitiated reader will inevitably have a hard time understanding it. Theorizing inevitably involves struggling with complicated ideas until you understand them so well that you can present them lucidly. Torturously written texts full of arcane jargon are an indication that the author has not spent the time needed to clarify his or her thinking. No wonder that the reader finds herself flailing to understand. This is not to say that writing should be reductive or simplistic, or that the reader should not have to think carefully and occasionally re-read a text in order to understand it. It does mean, however, that it is the writer’s job to digest the ideas sufficiently so that s/he can make potentially complicated ideas accessible. This takes time, effort and creativity, but, as the saying goes, the audience’s easy reading is – and should be – the writer’s hard work.
Second, I would argue that academic writing should always address a broader and, at least, to some degree, non-specialist audience. Currently this task is left to the ubiquitous handbooks and textbooks which publishers today seem to adore. While such texts are useful for providing overviews, simplifying theoretical concepts and offering tools for teaching, they should not be the only vehicles for accessible writing. In the interests of initiating critical dialogues across disciplinary borders, both within and outside the academy, all of us need to learn how to write for a broad audience of interested readers.
Of course, at this point, some of you may be thinking that your audience is the least of your problems when it comes to writing. Within European universities today, where academics are expected to produce more, while being given less time to do so, it is hardly surprising that bad writing abounds. Half-digested theory and incoherent arguments are more the rule than the exception. For many of the contributors to the European Journal of Women’s Studies, who are struggling just to write in a language which is not their own, translation issues may seem more relevant than good writing. Nevertheless, it is my fervent conviction that if we all tried to write for undergraduates – that is, as clearly and engagingly as we possibly can – we would not only become better writers, but we, at the European Journal of Women’s Studies, would receive better articles, and, last but not least, our readers would not need to feel guilty for being unable to understand what they had been reading.