"You need to find a white guy" my supervisor said to me, during our meeting today. No, she wasn't giving me dating advice. She did mean 'guy' in the 'you guys' kind of way that applies to humans, you know, the way 'mankind' refers to all 'womankind' too. (When addressing my daughters I frequently say 'you guys need to clean your rooms' or similar things. I did have a non-English speaker question why I referred to my female children by a term she identified as male however) I did get my supervisor's drift though... and since we talked about white women too, she wasn't being sexist.
We were talking about which novels and novelists I would be talking about in my dissertation, and the 'you need a white guy' was a nod toward the concession that if you want to talk about contemporary British fiction, you can't just talk about fiction by postcolonial writers. You have to talk about some of those white 'guys' like Amis or Swift, or Barnes, or Byatt. It's a very good point. If I don't talk about at least one of those authors, a hiring committee might not recognize my expertise in the contemporary British novel. I want hiring committees to think I'm smart, so I need to go find a white guy for my dissertation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment