Odd Impulse?

[arguchik]

Am I a weirdo, or would you have this impulse too?

I'm reading an essay by a fairly well-known scholar, about the Bodyworlds exhibit(s). In the essay, the scholar, as is very standard scholarly practice, refers to the work of another scholar who is considered an expert on this subject. "Other scholar" is Jose Van Dijck, Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. Now...seeing the name, what would you assume about "other scholar"'s gender? "Author scholar" assumed that Van Dijck is male, but in fact she is female. Here is a link to her faculty bio/profile, picture included.

I get that "Jose" is a male name in Spanish-speaking contexts, but it seems like one of the responsibilities of scholarship is to look into the matter before making assumptions and embedding those assumptions in a published essay. For that matter, I'm surprised that none of the peer reviewers caught and corrected the error. So I have a very strong impulse, right now, to send "Author scholar" a friendly, fact-correcting email.

Would you feel this impulse? Would you follow through on it?

FWIW, I probably won't follow through on it, because the issue has virtually no bearing on the content or import of this article; and I have no way of knowing that the error was made by Author scholar anyway. I feel like I would just come across as...that person. KWIM? LOL.

Comments

[shirtlifterbear.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree with you that you don't want to be THAT person.

BUT, would I want a piece of work I had in in public to be factually incorrect?

Nope.

[mstegosaurus.livejournal.com]

Hmm... José is a common Hispanic male name. Jose? Not so much. I would totally follow that impulse.

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

Sorry--that's my fault. I was too lazy to put the little tilde thingy over the last vowel. She does spell her name with that. But she doesn't pronounce it ho-ZAY; she pronounces it GZHO-zay. (Sorry, I don't quite know how to represent the soft J there.)

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

no one ever enjoys having their errors pointed out, but most scholars would rather know about them and fix them than continue to look silly to anyone who notices the mistake.

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

however, there's different ways to tell them. best is probably to say the least: "hey, I noticed the gender for so-and-so is mistaken in your essay 'Blanketyblank' and I thought you might want to know about it."

the more lengthy the explanation, the more risk you run of sounding all "you know, technically ewoks are not native to endor".

[fr-defenestrato.livejournal.com]

You can't be that person. Because I am.

[alice-at-night.livejournal.com]

It must be androgynous, as I know a dutchboy in Amsterdam, whose name is also pronounced Gzho-zay, though he spells it with a G.

Weirdly -

[leporidae.livejournal.com]

I've seen some biology journals in the past where it's accepted practice to refer to all authors as "he", despite actual reality.