From The Science Fiction Writers of America:
Have you ever read something that you knew was incorrect? Sometimes, research has fallen short of convincing people who know better, even though other readers might not notice anything wrong. For those who know, it can be jarring and pull them out of the story. How would you feel if that error was about your life? Your personal history? Your family’s history? Or something intrinsic to who you are?
Sensitivity readers exist as a consultancy resource to offer an authentic perspective regarding how marginalization affects characters, settings, and worldbuilding, and to provide feedback that an author can accept, reject, or question. That feedback can include, but is not limited to, problematic tropes, stereotypes, inaccuracies, and offensive portrayals. Utilizing this feedback, authors improve the representation so that readers who live these experiences can avoid harm and enjoy their books.
The controversy
Books have been recruited into the ongoing culture war that we’re seeing across our society with lurid headlines about Roald Dahl or the James Bond books “being forced” to change. Often, when an author has negative feedback or a book is delayed or withdrawn, the sensitivity readers are blamed.
Sensitivity reading is seen as new, controversial, and headline-grabbing. Changing anything is presented as “woke,” snowflake modern sensibilities. However, this practice has been employed for as long as books have been printed. Some great examples include Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the Bowdlerized version of Shakespeare, or how Grimm and Anderson fairy tales are softened for younger children.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa-Loompas were originally pygmies Willy Wonka imported from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle.” Ten years later, Dahl updated them as having “golden-brown hair” and “rosy-white skin,” and Africa became Loompa-land. Dahl was happy to edit his own work. So was Dickens, with another book considered a classic. Dickens went back and removed over two hundred references to anti-Semitism of the Fagin character in Oliver Twist after criticism from a Jewish reader.
Stories with positive outcomes exist in modern reporting despite the media’s tendency to focus on authors who are less receptive. Recently, Irvine Welsh spoke candidly about when he’d written trans characters, and thought using sensitivity readers would be akin to censorship. However, Welsh said his sensitivity reader had wanted to make the book “as authentic as possible and was incredibly supportive. And it did help to make the book better.”
Joanne Harris, Chair for the Society of Authors, also made a great point when she tweeted: “If you don’t want to use a sensitivity reader, don’t use one. But if you’ve never used one, then maybe you’re not the person most qualified to talk about what sensitivity readers actually do.”
The process
What sensitivity readers look for depends on their specialty and the manuscript itself. Topics could include race, LGBTQIA+ experiences, disability, and other marginalizations. While what we’re looking for varies, we all look for authenticity. We read through the manuscript, searching for instances of stereotyping, bias, or harmful tropes, and providing cultural, personal, or community-related context to all aspects relevant to our read.
As a biracial British Indian second-generation immigrant, my area of expertise includes my identity, race relations in the UK, especially for the Indian/Desi diasporas, UK anti-immigration politics, Brexit, etc., through to India under the Raj, for both factual or fictional books. I can help with general racism, but I would always recommend finding a closer fit where possible.
With most fiction or non-fiction books, my sensitivity read is completed at the end of the editing process, before or during copy edits. I’ll be given the full manuscript to review or a selection of scenes. Picture books, however, require feedback for the very early script and work-in-progress art stage. A second review of the final art and copy will often be completed.
When reading, I’m working from my personal lived experience, from training, and any background research required, if it’s a particular time period, for example. If it’s authentic, I’ll give it a thumbs up and explain why; if it’s not, I will give suggestions on how to improve the authenticity. These suggestions might be in-line text or links to further resources where they can find more information.
I take note of initial impressions by using Track Changes in MS Word or comments on a PDF; then, on a second read, I’ll review how those impressions played out. Were people deliberately using stereotypes in order to subvert them later, or was it an accidental problem that needs fixing? I point out good representation, not only the negatives, and try to recommend details that help the story ring true.
The report ties back to a page number or a reference, so the author knows exactly what the comment refers to. If it is an overall issue, I’ll clarify why they must change something fundamental about the narrative.
Industry uptake
While there is no formal data on the use of sensitivity readers, I have noted an increase in requests and new clients. I worked with ten different publishers in 2021, thirteen in 2022, and sixteen in 2023. There was a similar proportional increase of requests from independent authors. My sensitivity reading peers have also noticed an upward trend, especially from publishers.
Many reads are one-off projects, but I have been working with some publishers since 2020, and I know of at least one publisher who uses readers for every book they release.
Bloomsbury, Bonnier, and Quarto told The Bookseller they had employed sensitivity readers as it was “important in inclusive, forward-thinking publishing.”
Why do it
Creating characters that reflect the world’s diversity is important for writers and readers. However, it’s essential to create that representation authentically. Consider why you’re adding characters different from yourself, and how you will feel if you get aspects wrong. Consider asking for feedback to create your best character rather than worrying about possible bad reviews or social media pile-ons.
Link to the rest at SWFA
PG tried to think of a book of fiction he had read that reflected the world’s diversity. He was unsuccessful.
PG’s favorite books are often set in a time and place very different from any PG has experienced. That preference takes him to many histories. Fantasy/sci-fi is another trip to a time and place he has never experienced first-hand and has never actually existed.
PG also bucks against overly-sensitive people, although in his former legal practice, he had to deal with clients who could be triggered by many and varied events and experiences. The hurly-burly and unpredictability of some hard-fought court cases were difficult for such clients to deal with.
PG tried to prepare clients for ups and downs in court proceedings, but the intense emotions when a witness delivers a nasty surprise instead of another brick in a carefully constructed wall can be hard to deal with.
Topics could include race, LGBTQIA+ experiences, disability, and other marginalizations.
So, do we need an L reader, G reader, B reader, T reader, O reader, I reader, A reader and + reader? How could a gay male possibly comment on the lived experiences of a lesbian woman? What does a + know of the B life?
It struck me that a much better description would be researcher; someone who can point out that what the author has written is factually inaccurate. Or, to point out the author to where they have painted people, institutions in a negative light and ask was this intentional?
Characters can be bigoted assholes to serve the story, but the author should never message harder than the story can carry (some authors can message heavily and still be entertaining, most cannot).
It struck me that a much better description would be researcher;
Motte-and-bailey. And I’m not accusing you, because I agree that “researcher” would be the correct term if the publishers really meant “do the research.” But I don’t believe they mean this.
The late Sharon Baker has a piece in “How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction” in which she gives advice on researching science fantasy. She wrote two novels with characters who were slaves. She lived in 80s-era Seattle, so she had to look up books on slavery. Talked to acquaintances of the slaves of the Pacific Northwest Indians, and interviewed prostitutes — including ten-year-old child prostitutes. Plus social workers, anthropologists, and male prostitutes in particular. If she were alive and writing now, she’d be risking the Amelie Wen Zhao treatment for not conforming to “the rules” about how slaves could be written or portrayed.
If one wanted to write a dystopian about people living in a totalitarian society, one should interview people who lived behind the Iron Curtain. Read books about the gulags, talk to survivors, talk to survivors of Nazi concentration camps, etc**. And yet: that’s the writer’s job. It would be cool if a publisher would give a contracted novelist a budget to do the research — their accounting department would love my receipts — but at the end of the day doing the research is the writer’s job.
So what does the “sensitivity reader” bringing to the table? This is a person whose job is to look for problems, and the key here is how they define “problems.” They give zero reason to believe they have intellects “sophisticated”*** enough to tell the difference between a story featuring an evil villain with a hunchback (let’s say) and a story endorsing discrimination and violence against hunchbacked men because the villain is has a hunchback.
I have read stories (unpublished, in a writer’s group) where it’s obvious the writer has some disturbing or offensive ideas about other people; the one that made my skin crawl taught me slurs I’d never heard before. But rather than a sensitivity reader, it would make more sense for the editor to just reject the story. If the story didn’t make them shudder, they could include a note about how the writer should do more research.
**The dumber dystopians don’t do this, though. The reason I typically don’t read that genre.
***at the very least a child’s-level sophistication, where Twilight Sparkle convinced the ponies in her village not to discriminate against the foreign zebra visiting Ponyville.
What would the sensitives make of The Mule, today?
(You’re too kind to the breed.)
Sensitivity reading/readers are necessary only when neither the author nor the editor knows enough to recognize something that may be sensitive or unintentionally offensive. Much satire is intentionally offensive; Voltaire, for example, got in trouble not just for his personal attacks on some of the more-corrupt members of the French aristocracy (admittedly, determining which members of the French aristocracy of the mid-eighteenth century were more corrupt was a struggle in itself!), but for his satirical takes on religious doctrine.
Of course, if commercial publishers didn’t draw their entire editorial staffs from the same narrow cohort…
Put another way: If the author, and the editor, actually do their research, they should bloody well be able to defend what they have to say against those who are offended. There’s a big difference between a book denying Shoah (the Holocaust), for which no “sensitivity reader” is going to prove any benefit, and a fictional book whose depiction of life for a gay teenager in a favela on the west side of Rio is “offensively inaccurate” to someone who grew up there and left several years ago. And there’s in-between, too. But the sensitivity reader won’t help; better research, better thought, and better writing will.
Agreed about the narrow cohort that makes up the world of commercial publishing, C. It’s either inherited wealth or gentile poverty.
Hopefully genteel poverty… oops, pointing that out was rather insensitive, wasn’t it?
All seriousness aside, this is one of those combination “research!” and “demonstrates a certain anal retentiveness on the part of second-language readers trying not to be confounded by homonyms” issues that’s — ok, I’ve got to admit it, well-taken. It’s also the kind of thing that editors at commercial publishers are supposed to catch, sort of like the difference between “He enjoyed the barbecue from her brasserie” and “He enjoyed the barbecue from her brassiere” (an error that I actually saw in print in a 1970s restaurant review).
About intentionally offensive, there’s entire genres that would be wiped out if the sensitives win. Cautionary tales, polemics, any vaguely realistic military/action thriller…
Then again, they’d prefer if those genres didn’t exist at all.
I once saw somebody mortally offended that an anti-hero iraq war veteran in a tough guy action thriller would refer to terrorists holding american college age girls captive for rape and trafficking as “ragheads”.
On the other hand, they’d probably see protago ists looking to escape a modern authoritarian dystopia as vilains.
No nuance or self awareness to be found among the breed.
It’s clear that the OP does not even care for what’s actually important.
“Once we’re prepared to admit that after all we’re not the only beings with personalities, minds, and above all feelings, and when we start to think about the ways we use and abuse so many other sentient, sapient creatures on this planet, it really gives cause for deep shame.”
— Jane Goodall