Feminist publishing house No Kidding Press: What books are missing in Russian
Under the heading "Comembers" we talk about girls who came up with a common cause and achieved success in it. But at the same time we expose the myth that women are not capable of friendly feelings, and can only aggressively compete. Publisher No Kidding Press came up with Alexander Shadrin and Svetlana Lukyanova. "Our goal is to present cult texts in Russian that have bypassed the Russian-speaking reader, as well as the most interesting new books," the founders explained. We talked with Shadrina about whether to divide the literature into “male” and “female”, and why even in 2018 it is hard for women to become writers.
Interview: Danil Lehovitser
How No Kidding Press Appeared
At first there was a blog in which we, with my affiliate, Sveta Lukyanova, wrote about literature and pop culture, viewing them from a feminist point of view. At that time I was immersed in the Western context, thanks to which books passed through me, from which a whole list of new points of reference for me grew - a canon, an alternative to the one I had dealt with before.
The new canon united the authors of the venerable American writers and journalists, the regulars of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, such as Joan Didion, Alice Munro or Lorri Moore, to those who wrote more experimental texts. I was very touched by the authors, united in the movement "New narrative "which insisted on the subjective in literature, on the use of autobiographical material, on the fusion of theoretical and artistic languages. In particular, what did Chris Kraus - the writer, which we will soon publish in Russian - as an editor of the series "Native Agents" in the publishing house Semiotext (e). She published radically subjective female voices, among which were Katie Acker, Aileen Miles, Michelle T and others.
It was difficult to keep it all in myself, so I created a reading group for our project No Kidding, which all sorts of people began to join, you could read and discuss about feminist literary texts in the original with them. And a couple of years later, Sveta and I matured to stop being timid and start buying rights and looking for translators.
About publishing books
It is difficult to talk about some kind of formed credo. So far, for simplicity, we say that we publish bold women's books, but under the watchful eye this definition will immediately begin to disintegrate. It's like a “strong female character” - convenient marketing packaging. Female writers, female narrators and female characters are not obliged to demonstrate some kind of "power" that it is not clear what constitutes. Moreover, a huge part of the feminist tradition is about how to make visible weakness, explore your position, reach a critical point, expose the ulcers to the crowd.
We do not pursue too plump story novels - for them, and so it is the turn of other publishers. We are interested in autobiographical histories, experiments with the form and uncharted (near) literary territories. Most of our books exist at the intersection of fiction, essays, memoirs, poetry, but they all speak openly about sexuality. Comics - an important medium for women, we are also actively engaged in them. First we will publish the Swedish comic "The Fruit of Knowledge" by Liv Strömquist, in which she explores the sociocultural stereotypes about the female body, based on a dozen of modern studies and pop culture.
The portfolio of books we are working with now has gathered quickly - this is something that is long overdue. We are guided by a strong sympathy for the book, but also by the idea that we can sell the circulation. Therefore, three of our five books are quite best-sellers. "I Love Dick" Chris Kraus - the iconic feminist classic of the last twenty years. The story of the passionate enthusiasm of the main character of a famous cultural theorist named Dick, but in reality is a reasoning in letters and essays about everything, and especially who has the right to speak publicly and why. While we were thinking about the need to establish a publishing house, it broke into the mainstream: it became commercially successful in the UK and based on its motives, the series was filmed.
The same thing happened with Aileen Miles, a great American poet, whose prose texts we lack so much in Russian. Her novel "Inferno" is subtitled "The novel of the poet." This text, like many of ours, opposes retelling. Fabulously, he is about a girl from a working Catholic family who comes to New York to practice poetry. It is also a testimony of an era and a novel about where art originates and how it matures. And how to relate to what you are doing, very seriously, not too serious about yourself. Three years ago, Aileen Miles’s books were published in major publishing houses for the first time in forty years, and she also made her way to the TV: her poems are played in the TV series “Transparent”, one of the characters is inspired by her image, and there she has a small cameo.
"King Kong Theory" Virginia Depant was published ten years ago, and it is republished in French, English, Spanish and other languages. The name Depant in France now seems to be booming from every iron. She is a writer, director and implacable critic of French bourgeois morality. This year, she was on the short list of International Booker. We published it for the last time back in Ultra.Kulture by Kormiltsev. Then she was known mainly for her scandalous novel “Fuck me,” written in the genre of “rape and revenge” (a genre in which a woman is first subjected to humiliation (usually by men), and then takes revenge for the perpetrators.- Approx. ed.). "King Kong Theory" - her only collection of essays. And this is the case when I disagree with the political position of the author on many fundamental issues, but the intonation is very hard, very funny, very invigorating text that sounds good in Russian and which would be useful to us here.
"Modern Love" Constance De Jon is the most unknown book in our catalog; translator Sasha Moroz brought it to us. I was skeptical, but it turned out that this is our very book. This is the postmodern text of the late 70s, which was recently reissued for the first time. De Jon also writes on behalf of the 27-year-old New York loser, but in her case, this "I" is a polyphonic one, as remote as possible from her. This is a very interesting book in its structure, in which events move a little forward and return to the point of reference in order to move in a different direction, while characters change names and roles. She wrote this book as a series and sent parts by mail to an audience of five hundred people, and also put it on the radio. Philip Glass wrote the music for this production.
It is difficult to call what we publish peripheral - perhaps not yet too familiar for local latitudes. Syksu in the seventies wrote that publishers broadcast imperatives dictated by the economy in which we exist, and the big bosses are not thrilled with female writing, which is not shy of itself. A literary agent about our books said: "Men often sit there, and they are so afraid." This is not the case. Women sitting there decently, and even more. We see that the big bosses of large publishing houses are talking openly about the “trend for feminism” and have long been noticed for themselves. And there are also independent publishing projects, samizdat and zines, comics, poetry, in which a lot of things happen.
Fear of authorship
In our courses "Write Like a Grrrl", which exist in parallel with the publisher, we hear an inexhaustible number of stories about the frustrations and blocks that women try to write.
One of the reasons is the so-called fear of authorship, themed by literary critics and feminists of the second wave, Susan Jubar and Sandra Gilbert in "The Mad Woman in the Attic" - Hi Jane Eyre. That is the fear caused by the patriarchal monopoly on art. Everything points to the absence of role models in the canon: writers who would not be ousted to the periphery were not locked in psychiatric hospitals (in the 19th century, a woman writing was considered a deviant) whose merits would not be appropriated by their husbands and mentors. After all, the literary canon, represented by dead white men, is a frozen, rigid thing, resisting rewriting. In addition to the tandem, Jubar and Gilbert wrote about it and Joanna Russ in "How To Suppress Women's Writing ", and French researcher Helene Cixou in several essays.
In culture, there are many not always reflected reflections on female writing. Russ, for example, wrote about the myth of an isolated achievement: when the writer can seep into the canon, but only through one work, which makes her achievement seem random. In Bronte, we know “Jane Eyre” - a love story that women are called to write. But far less we know “The Town”: according to the writer and feminist Kate Millet, “a long reflection on the theme of jailbreak” is a novel too subversive to be popular.
You can refuse to women in the author's agency directly or covertly. The most subtle form of this refusal is: the woman did not write it, because the woman who wrote it is more than a woman. For example, the poet Robert Lowell in the preface to the collection of Sylvia Plath "Ariel" writes: "Sylvia Plath becomes ... Something unreal, created anew, in a wild rush - hardly a man at all or a woman, and certainly not a" poetess "."
We always have a magnificent list of Victorian female writers on whom it is worth equating - these are the sisters Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot. But in place of the modernist female canon, for example, is the lonely figure of Virginia Woolf. Who do we know Jean Rees? In Russian, her novel was published once. Or the same Jane Bowles. Modernist men, in one way or another, read every teenager, assimilating this tradition, these plots, representation, and language.
Fortunately, women have long taken up the task of updating the canon themselves, revealing forgotten names and promoting the actual female letter. Thus, the British feminist publishing house Virago Press, which launched the Modern Classics series in the late 1970s, for example, pulled the writer Elizabeth Taylor out of oblivion, unknown to anyone during her lifetime. Or another British Persephone Books, which specialized in all the forgotten women's books of the interwar period. Moscow's Commonplace Publishing House has a curious series Ѳ that fills in the lacunae in Russian literature. The Women Prize for Fiction Award appeared as an answer to Booker's 1991 all-male shortlist, and this also greatly changed the situation. The fact that women are more or less leveled off with men in the "big" literature, including the merit of such institutions.
Is it necessary to divide the prose into "male" and "female"
French poststructuralists hinted at overcoming such a demarcation already in the seventies, insisting on the bisexuality of everyone and everything. Zixu Jean Genet attributed to the female letter. Or Virginia Woolf still said that you should not be something one - you need to be feminine, masculine, or masculinely feminine. Many voices are now heard at the junction of different identities and from within the spectrum, and it is the new women’s publishing houses in the West that are the first to include them in their publishing programs, to make gender-binary, gender-fluid voices audible.
I would like, for example, to publish "The Argonauts" of Maggie Nelson - a book written from the beautiful new non-binary world, about love and creating a queer-family. The piece was built as Nelson talk about the limitations of the language with his partner, a gender-fluid man, artist Harry Dodge. But it is terrible to take on such texts, not so much because the environment is not very favorable, but because it is difficult to find a translator for whom the search for this language would be a feasible and interesting task.
The task here is not just nominative - confidently giving names to what there are no names yet, identities, new models of relations, and so on. The question is what kind of literary language these stories should be formed to be understandable to the average-mass audience, and how this language intersects with the existing activist one - borrows it entirely, recycles or even rejects it. And this is a big responsibility, including to those people whom such stories represent.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to believe that “female publishing house”, whatever it is, is the only thing that impedes progress, and without these dotted lines, we would already be in the world of universal literature and not in the world where most , award and peer-reviewed books are owned by men. Suddenly it turned out that the project of the second wave is not yet completed and the agenda still contains basic questions about violence and power. Therefore, purely "female" projects will only be more.
