Gatekeeping Reviewer 2

By Amy Wan, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center

When I was trying to get my first book off the ground in the early 2010s, feeling desperate as the tenure clock was running, I received some advice along the way that I should publish part of the manuscript as an article so I could show publishers that both the idea of the book and I as a scholar were worthy of a book contract. I shot high—one of the more competitive journals in our field because I felt like I should; my graduate education at an R1 and my Ivy League colleagues in the department where I worked did not show me other paths. I was relieved when I was notified that the article went out for review because even if it was eventually rejected, I thought I could at least get a sense of the potential of my research through the reviewers, and their feedback would help me shape my ideas and develop the project.

Upon getting the email back with my reviews and a perhaps unsurprising rejection from the journal a few months later, I opened them with a nervous but still hopeful stomach. The first review was helpful—engaged with my thinking, gave me specific examples of where I needed to be more specific and develop a point, steered me towards helpful references, and gave some encouraging words. It came from a place of genuine engagement and was signed, a rare glimpse of the person behind the critique that signaled one person talking to another person. The review itself communicated a belief that I had something to say and pointed me in some directions to say it more effectively.

The second review, a clichéd reviewer 2, was none of those things. Some choice excerpts from the one-paragraph review include: “I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer for your consideration: I stopped reading this article after the first paragraph”; “The fifth sentence has a subject-verb agreement error in it”; “This reads like a seminar paper from a grad course. I’m disinclined to provide feedback on coursework”; “[this journal], doubtless, has much better material to draw on.”

Not surprisingly, not signed. While not all (hopefully most!) anonymous peer review delves into such unvarnished honesty, I couldn’t help but feel like this reviewer was taking advantage of scholarly peer review’s norms of anonymity.

This process of anonymous peer review for journals assumes a community of peers, yet it is still one where judgment, sometimes strong, is passed from one party onto another. Potential authors submit their scholarship in the form of an article, peer reviewers read and then they decide whether or not it is valid. The practice of anonymous peer review is intended to be the “gold standard,” a process by which peers evaluate one another’s work (and that work alone) in order to produce a high standard of research. But in its very rationale, this practice, so central to the institutional processes of “knowledge making,” is about gatekeeping (Anti-Racist, Baldwin, Cochran, Hidalgo et al, Martinez, Powell, Redden, Sánchez). Those who are more senior in the field, who have been anointed by an editor or an editorial board as experts to decide who and what to publish, often replicate what has come before–knowledge that those senior colleagues see as valid–as a result. In these determinations of what knowledge can be validated, published, and circulated, these direct and implicit exclusions affect who can feel like part of our academic communities and how our academic communities are represented through publications and scholarship.

As a result, peer review practices such as these uphold the colonial knowledge-making and sharing practices and ultimately the colonial institutional structure, and we need to transform these practices if we ever hope to do anything but replicate dominant knowledge. But making this kind of change in higher education, a fundamentally imperial and colonial enterprise (Grande, Tuck, Stein, Yang), often feels impossible. It often is impossible. The imperial and colonial foundations of higher education are embedded in its structures, such as admissions, hiring practices, or the way tenure is awarded, and also in these kinds of knowledge making processes. The institution itself has been built on the validation and dominance of certain knowledge over others, and journals are central to that process. Journals publish writing and certify it as knowledge, which is why outlets such as constellations, with its focus on cultural rhetorics and a “mentoring-focused editorial practice” (Powell 208), are vital to shifting our collective agreement about what knowledge is and how it gets to be presented and circulated. Cultivating scholarship that questions colonial and dominant structures means we must also actively work against the structures and processes of our knowledge-making system that also upholds these same values. In our field, our colleagues have done great work to outline concrete practices that reviewers and journals can follow to resist the privileging of dominant knowledge making practices. The collaboratively written Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors pushes for journal editors to support reviewing practices from an anti-racist stance, the NCTE Statement on Editorial Ethics outlines the role of editors to “engage more diverse, inclusive, and equitable publication practices,” and Raúl Sánchez’s chapter “Revising Scholarly Peer Review: Don’t be a Dick” gives advice to bring humanity and respect to the reviewing process. Yet the specter of reviewer 2 still looms.

This confessional in the form of an essay builds on my colleagues’ work on scholarly reviewing practices by reflecting on the affective impact of more traditional and still common approaches to scholarly peer review. Rather than just pretending to forget about a particularly harsh review and get over it, I “confess” about the existence of this review and share the sticky reverberations of my experience, even as someone who has since published articles and a book and has gotten tenured and promoted and promoted again. After many years, I resist the urge to hide from this bad review in shame in order to uncover how such feedback practices replicate colonial thinking that relies on upholding certain kinds of knowledge over others and privileges methods with dominance integrated into them. I use my current position and my seniority [1] to lean on some vulnerability and reveal the lived experiences and implications that the traditional practice of anonymous peer review can bring. Rather than accept a system of dominance and judgment that has become naturalized in academia, I use this experience to think through the possibilities of sharing and building knowledge with community as a common value. Uncovering the implications of the long- embedded practice of peer review is essential to imagining how we might bring ourselves to a different kind of future.

Aftermath of a review

When I received this damning review, I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to move forward. I was two years into a tenure track job where I was the only writing person and one of the only faculty of color in the department. I did not want to show any weakness at this moment in my career but I was struggling. My departmental mentor was an Asian American creative writer, and I can only assume she was assigned to me because she was the only senior BIPOC woman on the faculty at the time. But while nice, she offered little guidance in my field or for the process of scholarly publishing. And far from the reviewer’s damning characterization of “seminar paper,” I had actually worked hard over a couple of years on the article draft I had submitted. But I felt like I was floating around untethered–unmoored and isolated. I still had a good relationship with my dissertation advisor but how often could I ask him to keep helping me? And I was embarrassed to have received such a terrible review. I felt like I was on my own. Alone.

To be truthful, it was easy to undermine my confidence during this pre-tenure time. I was haunted by the memories of finishing my dissertation, the process feeling like a minefield of hidden expectations and high-stakes confrontations. The members of my now-distant grad school community were also all dealing with their own publication demands, tenure struggles, and life issues. There were people I probably could have reached out to during this time but something kept me from actually doing it. This review felt like a secret. It revealed what I had been feeling the entire time—that I would be found out to be a fraud, or at the very least, not that smart. As Mimi Khúc describes in her book about Asian American mental health in the university, the fear of failure “would mean you’d be discovered for the fraud that you are. Those of us already at the margins of the academy whose belonging is always under question, we feel this terror most keenly […] We are terrified that we will be discovered as imposters and then everything will be taken away from you” (104).

In the process of writing this article-to-be, I saw myself making a big point about the way the field engages with citizenship, one that was informed by my politics and my own experiences growing up in an immigrant household where citizenship was something to be respected, earned, legal, and tenuous. As the daughter of immigrants from China and Hong Kong, I grew up as a “conditional citizen,” as Laila Lalami describes, always toggling between identities, languages, and cultures. My childhood was a contrast between weekends spent in Flushing, Queens, where being Chinese felt like one of many possible identities, and weekdays in a mostly white suburban high school, where fitting in was the desperate goal. I wanted to understand the history of how conditional citizens are taught how to let that condition fade, all while the country does not let them. But these more personal stakes were factors that I was trying to hide behind bigger claims about citizenship and literacy, rooting them in what felt like important historical ideas to attempt to write something that seemed valid to our field and to its gatekeepers. Much like the shifting and contingent concepts about citizenship I was studying, I again found myself trying to shape myself to belong, this time to an academic community.

Was reviewer 2 seeing my efforts to make my personal stakes significant and deeming them unimportant?

But I clung to that first review. And let me be clear that the first review wasn’t necessarily “nice.” It didn’t let me off easy. It was critical and necessary and told me some things in a pretty blunt way about what needed to be done. The review talked specifically about the ways I was conflating certain concepts and that they, as a reader, didn’t understand why I wasn’t being clear about the implications of my discussion of citizenship on our field and on the ways I was blurry about teaching practices. But it also assumed that there was a person behind my submission, someone who deserved respect. The review began with praise about what they saw as the key question of the article and pointed out particular sentences that they liked through the review. They dug into my writing to find what they thought was worthwhile and made connections to related published scholarship. Feeling like my life and my job depended on getting this article out there, I revised and I revised again. I forced myself to rely on my grad school friends and a university publication group as readers. I held my breath and I sent it out again to a different journal.

This time, the editor responded with reviews pretty quickly, and I received an accept with revisions. I pushed down my internal critic and revised. The article got published in College English. “In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship” went on to receive the Richard Ohmann Award for Outstanding in 2012.
Despite this eventual traditional success, I still have wondered: 1. What makes someone write a review so unhelpful and dismissive?; 2. Why did the editor think this was an appropriate review to share after they had already decided to send the piece out for review, forgoing a desk rejection?; and 3. What is the effect of such reviews on scholars of color and how does it shape academic fields by exclusion? (And yes, I have wondered if that reviewer has ever connected this now award-winning article with the one they had handily dismissed, although my guess is that any kind of self-reflection is not this person’s strong suit.)

The original journal where I submitted publishes scholarship specifically for the field of rhetoric and composition so I am assuming that reviewers are in the field and have experience teaching writing. Because of this, I still can’t believe that reviewer 2 thought what they were saying would be helpful to the author of this piece they found so disdainful (and that the editor thought it would be helpful to share). That response seemed to go against every bit of research about responding to student writing from Nancy Sommers in 1982 onward—that teacher feedback should be used as a way to help writers realize what they want to say and the ways that feedback can harm students and impair their growth as writers. Our own experiences and the research on commenting on student writing should seemingly influence the respect and care that we bring to the process of feedback in classrooms, which in turn should influence how writing studies scholars take up scholarly peer review, particularly as the term “peer” implies treating someone as such. But while I was not this person’s student, it’s also clear that this person did not think of me as their peer, which reflects one of the core problems of the practice of peer review.

As I imagine my article’s reviewer 2 and how they approached this task of peer review, especially now that I have published a book, earned tenure, and been promoted, there’s only one answer that I can come up with to help me understand what led them to write such a scathing review. And that answer is privilege.

Peer review is supposed to be anonymous but it often still reflects the logics of academia and knowledge making—what the authors of “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices” called the “institutional, embedded practices that are often exclusionary” (3). The marginalization within this practice of peer review is hidden, invisible. It’s anonymous. But it emboldens certain parties to exercise the certainty of their power and it encourages other parties to endure it. If you are already feeling marginalized by academic discourse, if you’re unsure of your community, your voice, then when you read these damning words like the ones in the review I received, there’s a part of you that thinks, “Well, that’s right.”

Even though this person did not know who I was and I didn’t know who they were, I recognize the ways that I carry my racialized and gendered self with how I navigate these spaces, the histories and experiences of marginalization—what Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings calls, “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” My choice to be quiet, to be embarrassed, to take it, to perhaps even legitimize and rationalize such a terrible review, emerges from a lifetime of navigating white spaces, what Lorgia García Peña describes in her post-tenure denial survival guide Community as Rebellion as being “the One.” Her characterization of the One encompasses the “experiences of unbelonging” in institutional spaces that are “sustained by white supremacy, by the belief that we, as minorized women of color, do not belong” and that this status of the One “shapes every aspect of our work” (7).

The thing is that the people like reviewer 2 have probably never been “the One.” While we as a field have been moving towards changing this, the many are what have made up the foundation of our field, of knowledge-making in academia, for many years. As a result, they move through these academic worlds, never imagining they are not at the center.

Over a decade later, I still take this experience with me every time I write a review. So what if the person has “just” sent in a seminar paper? How many people are getting reviews like the one I received and get discouraged, putting their ideas and themselves away? When I act as a peer reviewer, I try to come from a place where I am trying to help the writer craft the article they see themselves writing and use my own response to reflect the most engaging part of what they’ve written. Sometimes that job is easier to do than at other times, depending on how evident the goals of the writer are in the draft, but I firmly believe that is the job. I recently reviewed a submission that felt expansive and a little bit unfocused, a bigger project perhaps squeezed into an article form. But as a reviewer, it wasn’t hard to identify the potential routes that future versions of this article could take and which felt like the most interesting to me and explaining why this was the case. It wasn’t hard to write a review, even a rejection, as if the person’s ideas were still worthy of my time and energy. And it wasn’t hard to acknowledge possible gaps in my own knowledge that might be influencing my approach, tell the author what I learned from this manuscript, and give writerly advice on how the author might shape the piece.

I recognized that this nameless author and I are part of the same community, even though I don’t know who this person is and they don’t know who I am. But as a peer reviewer–a faceless authority who is passing judgment on someone else’s hope–I wanted the writer to know they belonged to this conversation, this field. When reviewing other people’s manuscripts, I have no idea what kind of mentoring and community the author or authors have, whether they have other readers who could help them move forward with this project or if they are isolated and unsure. Like with the feedback we give our own students, scholarly peer reviews should be given generously and in conversation with the author, with the goal of guiding them towards the piece they see themselves writing.

Raúl Sánchez provides sound guidance to “respond intelligently, constructively, and collegially” (123) in his chapter “Revising Scholarly Peer Review; Don’t be a Dick,” with concrete discussion of mindset, approach, and strategy for the actual doing of peer review. And what is also implicit in his advice to not “act like a dick” in the process of peer review is the acknowledgment of the gendered and racialized ways that people approach peer review. This is not to say that the dicks in peer review are exclusively white men from privileged backgrounds, but rather to note that peer review is part of the structure of universities and knowledge making that privileges white men and has led to their success. Being a dick is sometimes seen as being a good peer reviewer because you are gatekeeping, because you are providing a clear sense of what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t, and because you are confident about that fact. But the consequence of this kind of dickish approach to peer review is what Malea Powell has described in which many scholars in “‘affinity groups’ (of color, queer, disabled, or living other minoritized identities)” are told their scholarship “didn’t belong” or “didn’t fit” (206). The peer review process can perpetuate these exclusions by making the struggles to navigate it naturalized and invisible.

Yet I don’t wholly indict anonymous peer review because the flip side is that I have used these protections to write about the ways, for instance, an author has not sufficiently dealt with race or their own positionality. And I can do so honestly because I don’t have to fear professional or personal blowback about my criticism. I’d rather preserve the practice of anonymity as one tool in the process of feedback but one that must be grounded in the goals of community, in which the humanity of the author is acknowledged and imagined in the review process. A shared understanding of community, one that includes writers, reviewers, and editors, needs to accompany the privilege of anonymity, an understanding of shared goals and recognition of how we relate to one another. Trust in that community, however elusive, needs to support such practices, even if we don’t know who each other are. Sometimes this means we sign our reviews, but this can also mean being clear about our positionalities and what our specializations are in ways that communicate to authors that we are respectfully engaging in their work and that our suggestions are coming to them as fellow readers and travelers on this knowledge exploration journey. We can write in ways that signal to the author that we see them, we know they are an actual person who is reading these comments.

Looking forward and leaving reviewer 2 behind

The process of anonymous peer review is deeply embedded in how we as academics publish yet, according to Melinda Baldwin, the practice of anonymous peer review was one that emerged from the Cold War expansion of higher education, the “quest for standardization,” and increased funding from government institutions. It wasn’t even a practice that was consistent across academic journals in the sciences until the mid-twentieth century, with journals like the New England Journal of Medicine using outside reviewers in the late 1960s and Nature doing so in 1973. Baldwin reports that “many journals that adopted refereeing in the mid-twentieth century did so not because of epistemic concerns but to lighten the editorial workload.” When we consider why we hold so tightly to the value of anonymous peer review, we should recognize that this practice didn’t come out of some desire for high standards of research or in order to minimize the clubbiness of academia but because editorial boards didn’t want to do all of the work of vetting an increasing number of submissions. This is all to say, this practice did not emerge from beliefs about upholding standards of knowledge and like any practice, it’s one that we can change. For instance, this journal (and many others) put together their editorial boards in ways that broaden the base of knowledge and bring in diverse expertise as a strategy to publish on diverse topics and change those traditional knowledge bases, as the editor of this journal described in a comment on an earlier draft of this essay (Hidalgo).

I look to approaches to peer review practices that emphasize humanity of the authors we don’t know and still boost one another up, much like the tenets outlined in the collectively written Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors (2021) and in NCTE’s Statement on Editorial Ethics (2023). My critique of these more traditional practices of peer review is more than just from wanting to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or in order to boost someone’s self-esteem. And please don’t give me that tired story about standards. I do not believe you have to be dismissive in order to communicate the norms of a discipline, although I might argue that peer reviewers and journals should be open to research and writing that explicitly question those norms.
I do understand that you can’t legislate respecting other people. You can’t create a set of rules that keeps someone from being an asshole. But this is more than being “nice” or “kind” or even “empathetic” to one another; it’s about creating more equitable spaces and expectations in which reviewers recognize the tendency to replicate hierarchies that already exist. A journal and its editors can create such expectations and a culture in which such a review is unacceptable because it’s actually not really a review at all.

I want to hope that the type of reviewer 2 who gave me that hostile and dismissive feedback is rare and extreme. But even if we don’t hear about these types of reviews, either because people are embarrassed or because people (thankfully) don’t write them that often, there are still less extreme versions of reviews that do the same kind of gatekeeping and dismissal. I appreciate the peer reviewers, members of editorial boards, and journal editors who are asking themselves whose voices are being amplified, whose voices are being excluded and why, engaging in the “various ethical dilemmas that may emerge in scholarly publication given disparities in power due to multiple and often intersecting positionalities, including ethnicity, gender, ability/disability, class and sexuality, but also related to access to resources, theoretical and scholarly orientation, institutional affiliation, and location on an academic career trajectory” (Statement on Editorial Ethics). What biases and privileges are we bringing to this practice of peer reviewing? How do the pieces we like reflect our values? And how can we recognize our obligations to one another and to the scholarly community we are trying to build? We should be looking at the writing we review with a sense of optimism, to believe in the contributions they might make.

I have hope that our field is moving away, deliberately, from the types of reviewing processes that seem to pride themselves on upholding a boundary, rather than inviting conversation, especially when our colleagues produce documents like NCTE’s Statement on Editorial Ethics and the Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices: A heuristic for editors, reviewers, and authors. I like to imagine that my reviewer 2 is enjoying their retirement, no longer able to inflict harm through anonymous peer review. Rather than thinking about an obligation to gatekeep in the name of standards, what if peer reviewers thought about how the research and writing they’re reviewing might be better positioned to help the community—community of thinkers and scholars, yes, but also the larger groups that this research might speak to. Similar to the vital community practice of mutual aid (Spade), what can be learned from this model of recognizing what others need, of sharing resources, of mutuality? In this model, peer reviewers share the resources of their experiences with publishing and histories in the field, but also acknowledge that those they are speaking with will also have something to share. This approach to peer review can play a role in resisting the existing hierarchical and colonial structures in academia. Maybe we are unable to tear down the entire oppressive structure of academia but we can still work to transform our relationships with each other.
It is sad that kindness and respect for other people’s ideas might be seen as revolutionary practice. But this practice of peer review is fundamentally a gatekeeping one, and as a field, we can work to recognize and revise our practices, keeping reviewer 2 out of the process.

Front gate to Queens College, where Amy works

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers and to editors Alexandra Hidalgo and Lauren Brentnell for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Their feedback didn’t resemble reviewer 2’s in any way! Also thank you to Eunjeong Lee who provided critical feedback and moral support throughout the entire process.

Works Cited

Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. 2021, https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.

Baldwin, Melinda. “Scientific Autonomy, Public Accountability, and the Rise of ‘Peer Review’ in the Cold War United States.” Isis, vol. 109, no. 3, 2018, pp. 538–558.

Cochran, Angela. “Sexism in Peer Review.” The Scholarly Kitchen, 7 May 2015, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/07/sexism-in-peer-review/.

Grande, Sandy. “Refusing the University.” Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Routledge, 2018, pp. 47–65.

Hildalgo, Alexandra. “Comment on draft of Gatekeeping Reviewer 2.”

Hidalgo, Alexandra, Rachel Ihara, Lori Ostergaard, Leigh Grunwell, Sheila Carter-Tod (co-chair), Jennifer Sano-Franchini (co-chair), Statement on Editorial Ethics. NCTE, April 2023.  

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. One World, 2020.

Khúc, Mimi. Dear Elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. Duke University Press, 2024.

Lalami, Laila. Conditional Citizens. Pantheon, 2020.

Peña, Lorgia García. Community as Rebellion: A Syllabus for Surviving Academia as a Woman of Color. Haymarket, 2022. 

Powell, Malea. “Making Space for Diverse Knowledges: Building Cultural Rhetorics Editorial Practices.” Behind the Curtain of Scholarly Publishing: Editors in Writing Studies, edited by Greg Giberson, Megan Schoen, and Christian Weisser, Utah State University Press, 2022, pp. 202–12.

Redden, Elizabeth. “Is It Discriminatory to Require Peer Review?” Inside Higher Ed, 27 Jan. 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/27/indigenous-professor-denied-tenure-claims-narrow-focus-peer-reviewed-publications.

Sánchez, Raúl. “Revising Scholarly Peer Review: Don’t Be a Dick.” Revising Moves: Writing Stories of (Re)Making, edited by Christina M. Lavecchia et al., University Press of Colorado, 2024, pp. 117–27.

Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Verso, 2020.

Stein, Sharon. Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022.

Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 79, no. 3, 2009, pp. 409–27.

Yang, K. Wayne. A Third University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Notes

[1] I struggled to not label this “so-called seniority” because imposter syndrome is apparently difficult to shake.

About the Author

Amy J. Wan (she/her) is a Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center where she teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on writing, literacy, and pedagogy. She is the author of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (2014) and recipient of the CCCC Braddock Award (2023) and the Richard Ohmann Award (2012). Her current project analyzes the creation of spaces for change and resistance within the global US university through a historical and contemporary study of policies addressing access, diversity, race, and language.

Production Credits

Posted by: Gissell Del Castillo

Editorial Assistants: Gissell Del Castillo and Natalie Cohen

Managing Editor: Lauren Brentnell

Editor-in-Chief: Alexandra Hidalgo