Thread by @tressiemcphd

I am going to tackle this one quickly for a couple reasons. One, these replies have been going steadily for a couple of days. All from men. All of them. So let’s do some light discourse analysis…

https://twitter.com/michaeldgarber/status/1493448447168450560

The primary document features a woman’s first person account in an area that overlaps with her professional expertise. Based on what that document provides, this woman is a trustworthy subject.

Nowhere in that primary document does the woman describe her actions as fraught.

A non-expert but generally trustworthy reader assigned “incredibly fraught” to the primary text.

We can assume one of three things. One, the reader has some unpublished insight into the woman’s experience. Two, he is extrapolating from his assessment of her as a subject. Three, he is extrapolating from his own experience.

I am an expert reader with no additional insight into the woman’s experience. However, my expertise includes quantitative and qualitative data on American women and expertise in close reading complex texts.

Based on that expertise I determine that it is unlikely the reader has additional information not in the primary text and is drawing conclusions about the women’s actions based on either two or three.

I suspect it is three but am open to assuming it is two. In either case, for the activities described in the primary text to be incredibly fraught despite the subject never describing them that way, one must assume that those actions are somehow deviant or abnormal.

My expertise in and experience of being a woman in the U.S. provides comparative data on how deviant the subject’s behaviors are. I conclude that they are not deviant or strange or even particularly onerous.

I could be wrong but the woman — that trustworthy subject — says that I am not. I feel confident in my reading. Finally, calling a woman fraught for describing her decisions is very close to calling her hysterical. I didn’t like that. Especially given the poor reading on display.

You may disagree. But I am confident in my reading. You can keep tweeting me about it but sometimes I tweet back.