FROM EACH ACCORDING TO ABILITY

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

That is not to say that other cultures did not have their own ideas about gender and what constitutes a man or a woman. Nor is it to deny these may have been oppressive in their own right. It is to say that the West imposed its own definitions as a uniform measure, and unsurprisingly, everyone else came up short...

White people set the standard for humanity by which they, and only they, could succeed. And this standard meant a strict hierarchy that placed white men at the top with white women just below them, followed by men of color, and then women of color occupying the lowest rung. I do not mean to say here that what all women of color experience is exactly the same or that there is not a discrepancy in privilege among them; only that whatever their race or ethnicity, women of color are always considered below both white people and men of color.

White women were the beneficiaries of a status higher than that of people of color but subordinate to white men, and it is this very status that enabled colonialism to succeed."

Tadanori Yokoo,  drawings for Genka (“Illusory Flowers”), by Harumi Setouchi, 1974    

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