To scour the text

So tell us more about sensitivity readers.

https://twitter.com/john_boyne/status/1489523165151862788

The Times explores the question:

Joanne Harris*, the author of Chocolat, took umbrage: “I think you’re confusing sensitivity with weakness . . . It takes courage for an author to admit they may not have all the answers.” Dickens had revised his depiction of the Jewish character Fagin in Oliver Twist, she argued, removing many references to the character’s religion after corresponding with a Jewish critic, Eliza Davis. “He showed the capacity to grow. Perhaps that’s what makes a great writer.”

*The Joanne Harris who declined to remove a “fuck” from her latest novel for a US publisher.

But a Jewish critic who enlightened Dickens isn’t a “sensitivity reader,” she’s a reader with knowledge of a particular subject – a particular set of people – that Dickens didn’t have.

Other writers are incensed by sensitivity readers. None more so than Kate Clanchy, the author who was accused of using racial tropes in her 2019 memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. After the furore, her former publishers, Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, sent the book to a number of sensitivity readers to scour the text for problematic content before it was reprinted.

But hang on. Who are these sensitivity readers, and what is their training? What do they know and how do they know it? How do publishers know what they know and how they know it? How does any of this work?

Clanchy also claims that a sensitivity reader flagged her use of “gay”, saying that she should have used “LGBTQ”…

Like hell! The meanings are sharply different, and it’s not more “sensitive” to use the ever more useless catchall LGBTQ+#%&&%@. T is not at all the same as L and G, so no, that is bad wrong illiterate flagging.

Sensitivity readers are hired by editors and authors to review manuscripts before publication. They check for stereotypes, dialogue that doesn’t ring true or language that may cause offence. Although much of their work focuses on race, advice is offered in subjects ranging from “dating while fat” to “tiger parents” and age-gap relationships.

That’s all interesting but again I ask: how do they know any of this? Where do they get their expertise? How does anyone know they know more about it than we do? Where are the Sensitivity training colleges or academies or institutes? Who are these people?

Those who welcome sensitivity readers see them as a way to ensure authenticity when writing about communities a writer does not belong to, in the same way a sci-fi writer would consult a scientist. “I don’t see them as being antagonistic to free speech; it’s more a different layer of research,” Harris says.

Ah but it’s not “in the same way” at all. Presumably a sci-fi writer wouldn’t just consult a random scientist, but someone with specific knowledge of a specific subject. “Sensitivity” isn’t specific. What is it about sensitivity readers that makes them informed about all “communities”? Please do explain, I’m fascinated.

Maybe the brief isn’t “inform the author about this particular community or issue” at all but rather “search for everything anyone could possibly fly into a rage about.” If you hire “sensitivity” people to search for “sensitive” writings, they’re going to find them, so that you’ll hire them again. Baby needs new shoes.

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