As a freelance copy editor, I can’t tell you how many times the vast distance between a person’s writing and their persona has surprised me. For my work, I spend a lot of time applying for gigs and negotiating bids with authors. This means, usually, reading someone’s email, text, or chat message and trying to figure out what they are all about, whether my services are appropriate for them, and how much money I should reasonably charge them. Between receiving their messages and seeing their face or looking up their name—a lot can happen there, and I have found that almost nobody is who or what I expect. I recall a message-writer who wanted me to proof their book. Based on a few brief exchanges, I was convinced they were a high school student. I thought they were a bro. I thought they were a quarterback. They gruffly scheduled a Zoom call with me. On logging on, I saw before me an elegant middle-aged beatnik in San Francisco, calling with his lovely partner by his side from their kitchen. Perhaps one could argue that his initial messages reflected his inner bro, or his former bro, but I am not convinced he ever was a bro. With you here now, I would like to move from a completely different premise, which is that people’s writing does not or perhaps could not have any connection to who they “are.”
This is my circuitous way of saying, I would like to contribute some thoughts to this question of peer review and who exactly these peers are, whom we are reviewing.
In academia, most scholarly articles are published via a process called peer review. After a scholar submits an article to a journal, the editors of the journal handle this process by sending the article out to other academics in the field. These academics then read the article and offer their opinions on its strengths and weaknesses, ultimately sharing their decision on whether the article should be accepted, rejected, or what is very common, accepted with some kind of revisions to the research or writing. Traditionally, this was an anonymized process whereby neither the author(s) nor reviewers knew the others’ identities, only the managing editor did. In theory, this was meant to protect the rigor of the work—if the reviewers were judging the work itself, then they could be free from other types of judgments, which is to say, selfie judgments. Free from judgments, but of course not really; for example, back in the day and still today, this is hardly an antiracist process, since the entire academy was a hub of white supremacy and supposedly “objective” standards of good writing were and are based on writing styles that uphold whiteness. But right now, I don’t want to talk about writing styles. I want to talk about this process of exchange itself. And in other ways, too, there is very little about this process, sometimes considered very “pure,” that is actually objective. An editor is handling the process the whole way through, intervening with their decisions. And the reviewers themselves, although usually experts, are biased and fallible and riddled with mundane, worldly problems.
Nonetheless. Let us admit that an objective, anonymized process like this, however flawed, is dramatically different from a number of other approaches to writing and editing we can imagine, which all embrace and incorporate people’s selves: zine writing, community journaling projects, maybe even political thinktank brainstorming that is openly biased, and so on.
Amid this mix of possible ways to publish, it is the systems for academic publishing and for mainstream nonfiction publishing that are the most interrelated, and to my view, increasingly so. Some academics consider mainstream publishing beneath them and some journalists consider academics irrelevant, but in reality these two worlds overlap quite a lot. For example, both worlds share goals of quality, relevance (whether relevant to a field, or relevant to the public), originality, and accuracy, all things that we really, really need. More and more, though, and this is the crux of my critique, as people try to improve academic publishing and make it less harsh and less misogynist and so on, what is actually happening is a loss of rigor in both of these realms—in favor, basically, of profit. So, while academic publishing is increasingly influenced by the nonanonymity of popular publishing, what if maybe it should be the other way around: maybe all publishing should be more anonymous, not less.
One argument against the anonymity and intended objectivity of peer review is that selves are important and they are worth attending to. Well, as many have already argued, we have no shortage of editing and publishing that very much does incorporate the self—not the writerly self, the writing “I,” which obviously I would never argue against—but the self self, the person who is not the writer but who is a persona or photograph or profile associated with the writing, yet not inside it. Does this self-self-based publishing not describe the dominant, most common form of editing in mainstream journalism and media, at least in New York City and U.S. publishing scenes? Among journalists and essayists, the process is basically that you send a short proposal (pitch) to the editors, or meet with them somehow, and then they decide whether you (and secondarily, your ideas) are a good fit for their purposes. This is how we end up with, it barely needs to be restated, essays about nothing, fluff content for clicks.
In the last few years, at least in my area of the humanities, this popular approach to editing has influenced academic processes of review. More and more, I think humanities academics are receptive to a self-self-based approach—that is, a nonanonymized process where the authors’ identities are taken into consideration as part of the process. Today there are many approaches to the process, and many incorporate much more of the authors and reviewers both. In my own experience, I have encountered a range of approaches even within the handful of my own pieces that have been peer reviewed. A few of these followed that doubly-anonymized process mentioned above. One followed more of a group peer review, which was cool, where multiple reviewers, some named and some not, all added to a group document. In one case, there was an interesting approach where we (the authors) were invited to nominate/suggest our own preferred “peers” to review the piece. All of this is to say that peer review is, to my knowledge, more fluid and flexible a format than perhaps ever before in the U.S. academy. For sure, there has always been some level of human subjectivity in the vetting process. And as an open-minded person, I can appreciate why it’s a good thing that people are experimenting with different, better ways of approaching this element; I support collectivizing and collaboration. But the truth is that I often catch myself asking whether we really want to move away from anonymous peer review.
On one hand, the mainstream popular approach has rarely served me well. Partly because my social media presence is confusing and unpredictable to most people, and partly because I dislike authority, especially bullshit authority, and many (not all) popular editors I have encountered seem ill-suited to regard my self-self as anything other than an underling or threat, or both. (Cue someone missing the point and offering me advice for how to better kiss the ass of people I dislike.) But more than these things, what matters to me is writing and words and language itself—and I will aways resent being made to privilege, when it comes to my writing, anything else. The best essay editing I have ever received was from someone who had never met me and who knew almost nothing about me, they had only read my painstakingly crafted pitch. They were not especially warm or friendly to me, yet I felt so held intellectually by them.
I understand that adding the self self to the publishing process can be a way to make a cold, careerist process more warm and humane. And okay, sure, fine. But personally, I do not like this. I do not want publishing to be a happy community where we dance around in our feelings and make each other feel good by landing each other gigs to keep our numbers up. To take the extreme stance: I don’t want everyone to participate and feel like they have a chance; I don’t want to read wrong ideas by bad writers published because they knew somebody who knew somebody. Of course, this view is a bit of a straw argument. Because in reality, I don’t think many journals are just pulling the wheel all the way over to pure nepotism and narcissism, even if that is part of it. And to address an awkward topic to discuss, I also don’t think it’s that the system is unfairly favoring minoritized writers, who are still discriminated against, even as most of the all-around best writers are minoritized people who do not have a platform. It’s more common that journals are adopting some good changes, ones that pull history forward, ones driven by principles of justice or repair, and generally speaking these are good things. I’ve experienced them myself—like the project where we were invited to choose our own peer reviewer, bringing them into our scholarly dialogue in a beautiful way. This wasn’t anonymous or purely objective, but it was fun and helpful, and the result was not any less rigorous, I don’t think, than if the process had been anonymous.
And yet. And yet. Something in me yearns for real peer review, truly anonymous peer review, a space where one can be encountered not as a name or as a credential or as part of an institution, but as a writer whose medium is words and language and facts and figures. I delight at the idea of someone lovingly forced to seriously reckon with my writing in a rigorous way, as they encounter it, in as pure a vacuum as can be, unattached to me and whatever preconceptions they might have of me and my “self” (the self-self).
For me, it is the anonymous approach that offers something more like real community. Not a fake community—a group of breathing conservative academics I have to stand around with at a refreshment table while listening to terrible opinions—but a real community where we test out ideas and grow. At least in this respect, in the world of publishing, yeah, I actually do want distance. I want small pretenses to objectivity, even if our definition of objectivity is always changing. I want someone smart and informed to give it to me straight and say, “This doesn’t make any fucking sense, the points in paragraph #2 don’t add up, and it’s going to be embarrassing and tragic if anyone takes such a bullshit framing as fact.” Of course, I also want somebody to say, in their own understated way, “page 10 is the most insightful thing I have literally ever encountered.” The crucial thing here, though, is that I don’t want them to say this because they know me, because they know my mom, because they were my professor’s drinking buddy, because they read all of my other articles that made a splash and they want to ride the wave, nor because they need more Idahoans to meet the Rural Girl quota. I want them to say it because it’s simply true.
For one of my peer-reviewed publications, I was the recipient of two reviews. In this case, it was Reviewer #2 who was the genius, and Reviewer #1 was the ding dong. The dialectic. The latter seemed to have no interest in my article and they had mainly petty complaints to contribute. But the process itself accounted for their lack. No one else involved cared at all what this silly and very ignorant person thought. They were dead to us. We didn’t need to tell them this and say, “God, what a dumbass”; we just never spoke of them again. But it was the second reviewer who carried the thing. This reviewer made me feel like a million bucks. They took their time—it took them months and months to get back to me—but it was so worth it. For their response, this reviewer composed for me a small essay that felt to me like poetry itself. Receiving something thoughtful like that changes you. To be the subject of such care and attention is truly a gift that cannot be described in words. We should all be so lucky to receive something like that even once.
Going the other way, I have peer reviewed one article. It was the only time I was ever asked. Since I am a bit underemployed, so I had the time, and because I love reading and the topic interested me, I happily agreed. And because of my own reviewer’s generosity, I knew just what to do. So I took my time with it. My response sat on my computer desktop for weeks; I revised it five or ten times before I sent it their way. Although I had no idea who they were or where they lived or how big they were, so based only on their writing, I tried to imagine not their “self” nor their self self, but their self³: the self inside the writing who is different than both the “I” on the page and the “I” on the profile, and I tried to write to them.
So, anyway, I like peer review. I think it makes writing better, and in that process we become better, too.