This month’s U of C magazine has 2 great pieces in it that I wanted to share.
The first is on my friend Lauren’s work re: The Female Complaint.
Berlant first conceived The Female Complaint two decades ago, when she realized that Erma Bombeck, the late-20th-century newspaper and magazine columnist who satirized suburban family life, was “writing the exact same sentences” as Fanny Fern, a mid-1800s humorist who skewered marriage and middle-class domesticity in her weekly New York Ledger columns. Both women drew large and loyal readerships: Bombeck’s books were best sellers, and Fern became the nation’s highest-paid newspaper writer. Berlant found it “depressing” that two women living 150 years apart would churn up the same struggles, “but I was also curious. It meant something wasn’t changing.” Her curiosity yielded a 1988 Social Text article, “The Female Complaint.”
The article conceptualized what she calls female complaining: a mode of self-expression that simultaneously protests “patriarchal oppression” and concedes its inevitability. “What’s interesting,” Berlant says, “is that from its origins women’s culture has a big critique of male dominance, both in the political sphere and at home, but it also wants something like the good version of that normativity to be the condition of happiness. It’s like Julia Roberts at the end of Pretty Woman saying, ‘I want the promise.’” But time and again women find that promise to be fantasy. “In subordinate populations’ intimate publics, the presumption is that the general world is not organized around their flourishing,” Berlant says. “So hip-hop culture is about police, and women’s culture is about being disappointed in love and with children and at work.”
In The Female Complaint, Berlant returns to the “discourse of disappointment” in 19th- and 20th-century women’s culture, analyzing it through close study of literary, theatrical, cinematic, and political works and histories of psychoanalysis and liberal public theory: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Show Boat; Imitation of Life; Now, Voyager; Landscape for a Good Woman; The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and Uncle Sam Needs a Wife. Most of those works have been remade, or else adapted to the screen or stage. “If people are returning to something many times, it means it has a story to tell that isn’t finished,” she says. In her book’s preface, Berlant asserts that the “unfinished business” relates to an unresolved question—”the desire for and cost of feminine conventionality.” Women return to the same stories, she says, “for a re-encounter with the problem of survival.”
I’ve had a couple of gender-related experiences at work lately – one relating specifically to the scarcity of female designers in our industry – and the second, to statements about how openly emotional communication styles that some women have can make some men uncomfortable in the workplace. Neither of these was a fun conversation – both had their frustrations. So they have been on my mind for the better part of the weekend.
Before I saw the article on Lauren’s new book, I was toying with the idea of writing to a few women I know personally- to see if they had any advice about my current train of thought (essentially setting the stage for the Female Complaint). Instead, I decided to share the ideas here.
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Question: Do the two gender/work conversations I had this week directly reinforce each other?
Specifically – emotion at work is a reality within both Game Development and Academia – realms where the main product of work are new ideas. Whether it’s a game, a business plan or a thesis – there are bound to be heated disagreements about design, features, schedules. The collaborative and creative nature of these environments (which attract so many core contributors) actually create tension on a daily basis. Emotional talk is bound to occur.
As Virginia Valian and others have shown – workplace responses to women (especially in the realm of conversation & idea exchange) are not always equal. In heated debates where a women is passionately engaged, men may follow-on or reinforce patterns of dismissal that damage the woman’s relationships with others in the group – however inadvertenly.
And as the conversations, publications and years accrue, even a small discrepency in the way women are evaluated leads to unfortunate results.
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Now consider the other article I wanted to highlight – which covers Tanya Menon’s research into idea valuation and emotion in the workplace:
A behavioral scientist who studies organizational culture and decision-making patterns, Menon has spent more than a decade analyzing how businesses and businesspeople assess new ideas and why they often fail to grasp the value of innovations developed within their own ranks…
…Simple envy isn’t the whole explanation. Internal ideas are more easily scrutinized and picked apart than those seen from a distance. But personal motivation can be potent, Menon says. “In a business era that venerates creativity, novelty, and thought leadership, ‘borrowing’ knowledge from colleagues is not a career-enhancing strategy,” she wrote in a 2006 Management Science article. Bosses shower awards, bonuses, and promotions on innovators. Employees who learn from another’s idea may be perceived as followers, Menon says, and “managers reward the leader, not the follower. That gives me an incentive to cut down your idea and put my resources into promoting my own.”
Emotion also plays a role. People worry about losing social standing, looking like a thief, giving public deference to office rivals, and appearing weak or dependent. Corporate incentives and policies, Menon says, should ameliorate, not intensify, these reactions. In the Management Science article she and coauthors Leigh Thompson of Northwestern University and Hoon-Seok Choi of South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University found that a simple “self-affirming” exercise, in which people listed some of their accomplishments—”even just ‘I’m good at art’ or ‘I’m a good tennis player’”—or described values they cherished, helped ease their sense of being threatened. “Afterward, they did not derogate an internal person’s ideas,” Menon says. “They felt more comfortable saying, ‘This is a good idea worth pursuing.’”
Design is an inherently a communication-driven job, where passion and emotion are critical to success – as is the general ability to distribute and champion ideas. A strong designer at any level must be able to access, leverage and edit the creative ideas of an entire team – convincing them that these ideas can be shaped into an overaching, aesthetically pleasing whole. Creative collaborations take the issues mentioned in Menon’s studies to a whole new level – as the day-to-day environment is one of continual idea exchange, valuation and validation.
If there are inequalities in the way gender effects the perception of core communications re: ideas & thought leadership – we have a problem.
I’m not sure if the connection exists – but if it did, it could effect the promotion of female design talent – or even create a lack of supply. IE: Most designers come to the job from another discipline – working up from test or into it from production, art or programming. So in theory, any issues w/r/t promotion would impact womens’ ability to make that career shift and get into design at all!
Could the emotion-scape of the creative workplace be working against female designers?
It wouldn’t even have to be that female designers *are* inherently more emotional (I doubt they really are) – just that the perception of their behavior casts them in that light for some males – which has that small, but long-term effect of keeping them from achieving thought leadership within the field.
There has to be *some* reason that when I search LinkedIn for “game designer” I get page after page of male candidates. At ~40 to 1 based on my informal survey – it’s an uphill climb to find women who are experienced and affordable for working on teams within our industry. And that is not good.
At one point, Scott Roberts and I we were both living in Chicago, but we didn’t know each other. Later, we exhanged some email about Depaul’s emerging games curriculum – and agreed to get together. But every time we try to meet up in a city, one of us gets totally bogged down by some professional obligation or other – or, called away at the last minute entirely. 
