Breaking The Barrier: On Race, Gender, And Junot Díaz
By Thea Lim, cross-posted from The Millions
Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her
A few weeks ago, in the The New York Observer, Nina Burleigh threw down the notion that the enormous success of Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her is undeserved. Díaz is beloved not because he is a great writer, Burleigh argues, but because Díaz is a man, and a man who delights us with tales about dashing players and their hapless women victims:
Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?…Mr. Díaz’s wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side.
And on Twitter, multiple women writers I respect and admire, like Roxane Gay and Elliot Holt gave Díaz his due, but went on to say that Díaz’s style of confessional writings about love would not fly if written by a woman.
Normally, I’d be all over this kind of thing. I love talking about the lack of gender equity in publishing (in fact, I did for Bitch Magazine this summer). But I can’t agree that Díaz’s success is gender-based; because, yes, Díaz is a man, but he’s also a man of color. Critics who say that Díaz would not receive the same warmth if he was a woman are overlooking the factor of race.
The VIDA statistics that count the number of women’s bylines versus men’s in prestigious magazines are undeniable: in the last two years, in the publications surveyed, only one-quarter to one-third of bylines went to women. There is no parallel count for writers of color, (anybody want to start one?) though we can count prizes. Since 1917, a total of five men of color have won the Pulitzer: James Alan MacPherson, N. Scott Momaday, Oscar Hijuelos, Edward P. Jones, and Junot Díaz. Thirty women have won the Pulitzer, almost half of them condensed in the last 30 years, and three of those women were women of color. Since 1950 two men of color have won a National Book Award in Fiction–Ralph Ellison and Ha Jin–and 15 women have won an NBA in Fiction, two of them women of color. And these numbers are reflected in MFA programs and at writing conferences. For example, I had the great fortune of attending an MFA program with close numbers of men and women, though gender parity did vary from year to year. But over the three years that I attended the program, I can count only seven men of color and 12 women of color probably out of about 150 students.* While no stats on gender and race exist for MFA programs, I don’t think that my program was out of the norm. Even at VONA, the annual Bay Area writing conference for writers of color–where, I should disclose, I took a workshop with Junot Díaz in 2007–the number of women attendees outstrips the number of men. I’m not trying to say that publishing isn’t difficult for women; I’m simply trying to say that it ain’t easy for men of color, either.
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