Amidst the distinct fixtures of Columbia University’s campus, Butler Library’s indomitable gray stone walls—or, to be more precise the names engraved upon its walls—ignite controversy like match struck to tinder. Etched into the façade are 18 names representing famed authors at the heart of the University’s core curriculum (well, all but Demosthenes), accompanied by the names of select early American politicians and other writers. Together they share a common theme—they are exclusively men.
This fact has positioned Butler library at the center of a number of student protests, from furious feminist banners unveiled from its balustrade to the more recent student pornographic film, “INITIATIØN,” critiquing societal gender expectations while filmed secretly within the bowels of Butler. Yet despite Butler Library’s pervasive masculine presence, we need not ponder why Columbia President Nicholas Murray selected these male figures to grace the prestigious center of research nor why these men have dominated the core curriculum for class after class of undergraduates—we know these writers carry significant cultural currency. Instead, I want to consider how our consumption habits are formed and how they might be used to disrupt gender inequality.
For some, the solution to the gender imbalance in literature is to champion a pendulum swing toward women writers, flooding syllabi and reading lists with only women or a majority of women. However, the string of names upon Butler’s walls represents a larger problem of cultural passivity, the absence of meaningful critique for what gains cultural currency and how we consume it. By first becoming conscious of our consumption habits, we engage in a profound act of subversion to, what Adrienne Rich termed, the “passivity of the Western Mind.”
Rich argued in her foreword to On Lies, Secrets, and Silence that swapping our passive consumption of male writers to the passive consumption of women writers is not radical change. She asks,
How shall we ever make the world intelligent on our movement [of feminism]? I do not think the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention (14).
To this end, 2014 has been named the “Year of Reading Women,” the latest trend characterized by the #readwomen2014 campaign. In short, the project seeks to combat the very problem etched into Butler’s stone by encouraging the practice of intentionally reading women writers. Because few stop to consider the over-saturation of male authors upon our bookshelves, bibliographies, and institutional walls, men and women are taking up the campaign, often as if it were a spiritual discipline of sorts.
Yet we must approach campaigns such as this with care, for reading women simply for the sake of reading women, whereby women become tokens of progress, can lead us back into the habit of passivity. What is fundamentally at work in #readwomen2014 is the premise that a change in consumption is a solution to balancing or fixing gender inequality. However, consumption is not the solution but the problem. As Veblen and Bourdieu have demonstrated, upbringing, class, and education dialectically shape the economy of cultural goods. Which means, our choice of whom we read is informed by who we are in society, and what we read reproduces that stasis. In order to fundamentally address the state of gender inequality, our method and means of consumption must be critically examined along with its content.
If we are lured by the fantasy of a hashtag, following a well-intentioned trend down the same path of passivity, we then fail to recognize the intersectional dynamics of the role consumption plays in establishing personal identity and social position—our changing consumption habit is not simply to increase the visibility of women but to enter into critical engagement with how our consumption habits are formed in the first place. Feminism heightens our society’s consciousness of the inherent unequal power structures present and reinforced by our unconscious habits, and it is the very act of consciously consuming that begins fundamental change.
To disrupt the structural power difference between the genders, we must incentivize, not only the reading of more women, but the radical criticism of our literature consumption habits as well. Changing our societal passivity of the mind and uncritical consumption will require more than a hashtag.