The Interest Gap: Gender, Homophily, and Inequality in Book Reviewing

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 14. Cultural Dimensions of Gender, Love, and Work

Abstract

The author presents a mixed-methods case study of contemporary newspaper book reviewing in order to unpack how review editors and critics alike invoke socially constructed notions of similarity and interest to explain how and why critics are matched with particular review assignments. The data demonstrate that similarity and interest as allocative principles have a strongly gendered dimension. Quantitative analysis of the gender-pairings of authors, critics, and protagonists for 676 novels and in-depth interviews with critics and review editors reveals that (1) male critics are significantly less likely to review books written by or about women whilst female critics review books by and about men and women with equal frequency; and (2) novels by and about women suffer from or fall into the interest gap, wherein activities and concerns typically coded as male are represented as universal and thus of general interest, but female-coded experiences and concerns are viewed as particularistic and thus of interest to a more limited group of people (i.e., women). The article problematizes our conceptualization and conflation of interest and similarity as bases for evaluation; specifically, the author argues that understandings of who or what is “like me” are not objectively given in one-to-one correspondences but should be understood as asymmetric symbolic relations encoded by status inequalities.

Author

• Phillipa K Chong, McMaster University