Moira Donegan* has a review in Bookforum of Lisa Selin Davis’s book, Housewife. (“Moira Donegan is a writer and feminist” reads her bio, thereby distinguishing her from the oh so many anti-feminist or non-feminist writers publishing in Bookforum.) I first saw this and thought aaaah, right, Housewife, another book for the list. “The list” being an ever-expanding list of books I need to have read or reread (I definitely read The Feminine Mystique but probably in 2003 or something) in order to write my own. The list swells, the time in which to plow through it shrinks, and I make choices. I’ll get to how I do so in a moment but first, this review, and my reason for mentioning it.
Donegan includes in it what I have decided to call the Scolding Homework Aside.
For a book with such an ambitious time line, it’s not clear that Housewife’s author has done much of the reading. There is no mention of the Italian feminist Silvia Federici, whose work on reproductive labor has been essential to theorizing the housewife’s relationship to capital. There’s only one brief mention of Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose seminal 1989 ethnography, The Second Shift, revolutionized understandings of marital inequality and the role of domestic labor in working women’s lives. Davis’s book can be understood as a twenty-first-century rebuttal to Betty Friedan’s 1963 anti-housewifery classic, The Feminine Mystique. But it’s not clear that Davis has read it.
If this style seems familiar, it’s because Ann Manov’s recently-viral Bookforum review of Lauren Oyler’s new book of essays included these as well:
Oyler claims she is well read, even a “snob,” but great swaths of No Judgment rely on the thinnest of online research. “Vulnerability has come to be seen as a first principle of living,” Oyler concludes from a single search for the term on the New Yorker’s website.
And the epic:
[R]ather than asserting, without even this minimal evidence, that Brown was “repackaging” Freud, Oyler might have actually researched any of the pit stops between Vienna and the TED stage. In the ’60s, D. W. Winnicott developed his theory of the “vulnerable self,” a “true self” around which people erected the defensive “false self.” In the ’70s, John Bowlby developed attachment theory, which urged “avoidants” to become as comfortable with vulnerability as “secures” and has since metastasized into an unbelievably widespread pop psychology. In the ’80s, transpersonal psychologists like John Wenwood preached that vulnerability was “the essence of human nature and of consciousness” and that “getting in touch with our more basic human tenderness and vulnerability can be a source of real power.” In the ’90s, Carol Gilligan’s “feminist care ethics,” with its embrace of vulnerability and interdependence, came to the fore—certainly influencing Brown as she completed her social work PhD.
The reviewer has done her homework, you see, unlike the author who just Googled stuff. Manov continues:
And while Oyler includes one of Sheryl Sandberg’s many ridiculous utterances, she seems not to know that Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Gayatri Spivak have all recently called for what Spivak termed a “radical acceptance of vulnerability.”
Imagine seeming not to know the latest from Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum and also Gayatri Spivak on vulnerability, and writing about vulnerability all the same! How terribly embarrassing for Oyler, real spinach-between-the-teeth moment there.
In ancient times, I too once got a book review along these lines, not from Bookforum but same idea. The reviewer had done research in some area that wasn’t what my book was about and was aghast that I am such an ignoramus as to not have written the book she would have.
When this happened, I focused on the subtext, which is the style of book review that’s just the reviewer moaning that it’s unfair they weren’t the one handed, from on high, the perch of being considered the authority on whichever subject matter, a perch instead handed to this idiot who doesn’t even have the right friends or politics.
But there is another aspect of this that matters more than egos fighting over scraps, and…
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