Editing and Gendered Binaries

I struggle with how to think about editorial work in relationship to an analysis of sex and gender. One of the women editors from my dissertation research wrote passionately about editorial work as the housework of the literary world. Unappreciated, unpaid, often invisible. She felt that editorial work kept her from her true writing and that for women to take on editorial work, particularly editing journals to publish other women was folly. It did not strengthen or improve their literary careers and it invariably burned them out. I am not su that I agree but after a few weeks reading her letters and papers at the New York Public Library, I can understand her reasoning and appreciate the passion of her conviction.

Recently, I read this piece at the LARB. These editors make similar passionate arguments and I appreciate them. At the same time, I am not sure that I agree.

To begin, and perhaps obviously, editing is not historically gendered female. In fact, in our sexist world, the editors that are most idolized and revered are male. Think Paris Review. The New Yorker. Keep thinking. I do not need to elaborate. There are examples of powerfully influential editors, so the work itself is not inherently work relegated to the dustbins of history.

Second, the have been some extraordinary women writers who have done influential and important editorial work. Think Gilbert and Gubar. Think Lillian Faderman. Think Terry Castle. Keep thinking. I do not need to elaborate. Editorial work can be combined with scholarly work and creative work to build power and authority.

Third, editorial work is stimulating, thoughtful, and challenging work. In the best possible world, editorial work increases one’s capacity as a writer and as a reader. It also shapes and refashions the world into which one publishes. I think of Marilyn Hacker’s editorship of The Kenyon Review during which she created space for an extraordinary array of women writers, people of color–both men and women, and international writers.

Fourth, for most writers, scholars, poets, people engaged with wordcraft, we cannot write all day every day, filling our time with only our writing. Exhaustion sets in. Turning ones attention to writing by others, to reading and understanding their work, to thinking about how to present it to the world, is a way of refilling the well for the next day of one’s own writing.

Of course, editing can become time consuming. Writers can obsess on the editorial work and on the work of others and not attend to one’s own work. I am just not convinced that that trap is gendered. Certainly, gender influences it. I know I have been trained to be kind and responsive and to care what people think about me. I know I spend more time on occasion with someone else’s work to satisfy my own needs to nurture, to support, to be liked. On balance, however, I get more out of it than I put into it.

The article from the LARB has been in the back of my mind for a week or so. I feel peevish about it. I want a more nuanced analysis of editing and gender. I want a more holistic view of what a writing life looks like over a long period of time. What role does editing play in shaping writer’s lives at different points in our development? How can we think critically about sex and gender roles in the world and in our material conditions as writers without falling into easy, though often inaccurate, modes of analysis?

Finally, I wonder sometimes if editorial work is like hedging a bet on writing. If one’s own writing work is not recognized or in fact if one’s own writing work is good, serviceable, but not excellent, transcendent, does editing give us another crack at posterity?

What do you think about editing and gender? What do you dream of editing? How have editors influenced your work?

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