It is a brave academic who can abandon the prestige associated with being regarded an objective theorist, and represent her emotional involvement in a text, all the while analysing it deeply. This book of essays is a loving interrogation, with recurring themes such as feminism, white supremacy, queerness, fatness and sentimentality woven throughout. It stands on its own as an academic text but it’s obvious that the non-academic reader is welcomed.
Hannah McGregor begins by acknowledging the Indigenous people
of Vancouver, and exploring what it means to have a history of cross- (and
inter-) continental migration. What does it mean to be a white settler who is
informed by Indigenous multi-generational claims to land? Does being rootless
contribute to white people’s invasiveness to the Indigenous? “I read once that
settlers fetishize* relocation as an ideal because so many of us have lost the
connection to our home places. It’s a pathology to disdain staying put, a pathology
of whiteness.”
Another remarkable insight into the affect associated with white
privilege comes in a later essay, where she writes of 'my own limitations as a
white woman, grappling with the recognition that, even in my most intimate
relationships, I cannot assume that I understand the experiences of my friends
who are Black, Indigenous, or people of colour—indeed, that my desire to hold
everything, to empathize with every experience, is an extension of the logic of
whiteness and its desire for universality.’ As a white woman with anti-racist
intentions, this made me think about letting go of my need to make all the cultural
practices of people of colour legible to me, and prioritise a culture of
respect – for myself, and for others – first.
Hannah traces her interest in elevating the rights of
marginalised groups of people back to her feminist mother, who also modelled many
admirable qualities, including abrasiveness. This stood out to me because if
we are to do away with tone policing, being an abrasive feminist subverts
expectations of people-pleasing and respectability politics, and becomes a subversive
strategy of empowerment. More people should read their mothers as texts, embracing the specifics of their upbringing and thus problematising 'the view from nowhere'.
In an academic world where podcasts are still regularly seen as 'low culture', it's refreshing to find that 'A Sentimental Education' positions them as instrumental to self-discovery. I have never listened to the popular ‘This American Life’ one, but the essay ‘Getting to know you’ made me curious about the episode ‘Tell
Me I’m Fat’. According to Hannah, the spoken narratives of Roxane Gay, Lindy
West and Elna Baker here are only offered as valuable to a certain extent – the
host positions them as worthy of empathy, but an empathy which has its limits, and some
subtle fat-shaming undermines it. Furthermore, the podcast is more geared
towards providing the listener with infotainment, than it is to calling people
to political action. Through engaging with ‘Tell Me I’m Fat’ at different times
in her life, Hannah goes from feeling seen to being disappointed, but is able
to recontextualise her initial enthusiasm for it as an important step towards activism.
Fans of the author's own podcasts, ‘Witch, Please’ (which is both a fan’s and a critical
scholar’s engagement with Harry Potter) and ‘Secret Feminist Agenda’ (in which
she explores the meeting point between theory and practice, otherwise known as praxis), will find insights into the processes behind them.
Podcasting is represented as a gateway to different affective worlds and collaborative
relationships, a welcome departure from the limitations of academia, while also
reinvigorating the academic practice. One of the concepts associated
with podcasts is that of relatability - something which we encounter every day in our
consumption of popular culture, but rarely look at self-consciously.
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the essay on
#Relatability was the description of the knowing subversion of it in Carmen
Maria Machado’s memoir ‘In the Dream House’. In a heteronormative world where
there is little space held for healing from abusive queer relationships, ‘In
the Dream House’ is preoccupied with reliving a traumatic event while being only
able to show fragments of it at any given point. To draw
Machado’s text out from this complex essay which moves seamlessly between many
texts and a myriad of attendant themes is perhaps to do it a disservice, but I
must start somewhere.
And I must end somewhere: I recommend ‘A Sentimental Education’ for its fascinating treatment of subjects close to the author’s heart. It’s not just the #Relatability essay that is rich, complex and expertly woven: the same can be said for all of them. If something I’ve written about here captured your attention, you will find much more like it within this fabulous and thought-provoking book.
*The negative view of fetishisation could unfortunately be seen as kink-shaming.
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