labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet/ décembre 2008 -julho/dezembro 2008

New Directions for Studying Women Writers[1]

Susan Stanford Friedman

Abstract

This essay challenges the view that "women writers" as a category has lost its cogency, but urges a rethinking of its meaning and rationale. It argues that "women's writing" should encompass all writing by women, whether or not it examines gender or feminist issues; that feminist criticism needs to embrace four dynamic new fields: transnational studies; bioculture studies; transgender and embodiment studies; and digital studies. It calls for a new feminist literary theory and offers four strategies for globalizing the study of women's writing: (1) transnationalization ofdominant national traditions,  particularly Anglo-American and European women's writing; (2) expansion of the archive of  women's writing into especially non-Western  languages and literatures in Asia, Africa, South America, etc.;  attention to global circulations, intertextuality, and interculturalisms of women's writing;  comparative work through a method of "cultural collage" on a planetary landscape.

key-words:women writers, feminist issues,feminist criticism,circulations, intertextuality, nterculturalisms

There’s a sea change in the study of women’s writing in the United States and perhaps in some other parts of the world as well. This change is located in a series of transitions that are radically reshaping the field of literary studies in general and feminist criticism in particular. To name just four of them, there is first, the shift from national to transnational frameworks of interpretation, bringing with it a host of issues related to empire and imperialism, migration and diaspora, racialization, capital, and human rights.[2] Second, there is the rise of bioculture studies, making newly porous the relations between literature and science, the human and animal, humanity and the environment.[3] Third, there is the challenge to the category of “women” that builds on but goes beyond the 1980s and 90s insistence on intersectionality of identity categories to interrogate the borderlands between “male” and “female” in transgender and queer studies and between normative and other bodies in embodiment studies.[4] Fourth, there is the move away from the hegemony of print culture to the intensifying dominance of digital culture that challenges the category of literature as we have known it. Rather than regard these changes as a force for the dissipation of women’s writing as a category for research and teaching, I see them as potentially reinvigorating the gynocritical terrain of feminist theory and criticism—that is, the branch of feminist criticism that focuses on women’s writing.

Is Studying Women Writers Passé?

New schools of thought in the academy and the world at large have led many to consider the clumping of writers together on the basis of their gender old fashioned, passé, no longer “cutting edge,” and perhaps when it’s still done, even quaintly “retro.” As Sharon Marcus reflects in the PMLA Forum on feminist criticism in general, “When a critical school becomes the topic of a PMLA roundtable, it is safe to say that scholars currently consider it both solidly entrenched and dangerously diminished” (Marcus, 2006: 1722). Although Marcus and the other contributors to the Forum, including myself and Susan Gubar, write against a fear that feminist criticism, in Marcus’s words, “has lost” its “renegade dynamism,” the anxiety about feminist criticism as “yet another stale paradigm” remains. Feminist criticism’s success, its movement to the center, has become a measure of its marginalization.

The paradox of entrenched yet diminished feminist criticism—including gynocriticism, the study of women writers—exists within a larger contradiction of continued interest in women writers, whether they are studied as a distinctive literary “tradition” or in other ways. Conferences devoted entirely to women writers abound, often connected with ongoing associations: I attended four in 2007-08 and will attend another in 2009: the annual International Virginia Woolf Conference; the biennial British Women Writers Conference; the biennial Contemporary Women’s Writing Conference; Lifting Belly High: Women’s Poetry Since 1900; and the triennial Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference. Women writers are thoroughly integrated into many other conferences, from the Modern Language Association Convention to the kinds of international conferences such as Narrative; Modernist Studies; Comparative Literature; MELUS; American Studies; etc. (to cite a few prominent conferences in the U.S.). Courses on women writers still fill and overfill; graduate students still write dissertations on women writers in droves; articles and books still regularly appear on women writers. And so forth. The study of women writers is here to stay, and yet the fear remains in some quarters of diminishment and loss of dynamism.

Redefining “Women’s Writing”

To stay vibrant, feminist criticism must change with the times. But this does not mean the abandonment of women’s writing as a viable category. What I suggest instead is that we change our rationale for the category of “women’s writing.” Brilliant work from the 1970s created rationales for the category that worked explosively to wrench women’s writing out of obscurity, trivialization, and misogyny. Underlying this gynocritical work with its myriad methodologies and interpretive strategies was a common core: the focus on women writers as women, as their lives, loves, work, affiliations, and intertextual relationships have been shaped by patriarchal poetics, politics, culture, and material conditions. Even as feminists of color and lesbian feminists developed pioneering theoretical frameworks for intersectional analysis of gender’s articulation through other axes of difference and power, the founding assumption of gynocritical feminist criticism remained in place. The category of “women writers” (or subsets of that category such as black women writers, lesbian writers, Asian American women writers, Latina writers, and so forth)—rested on the assumption that women writers have something in common because they share gender oppression/repression, or gender-race oppression/repression, or gender-sexuality oppression/repression, or gender-colonial oppression/repression, and so forth. Whether implicit or explicit, an underlying assumption of the field was a communitas of women—or subsets of women—with some degree of common histories, experiences, desires, fantasies, languages because they were women, no matter what their many differences might be.[5]

I don’t believe that the issue of oppression and the identity-based justifications for women’s writing are any less salient today than they have been for the past thirty years. The last time I looked, the oppression of women is still a worldwide reality, and for many women, it is still a brutal reality that affects their access to the most basic of human rights—safety, shelter, education, food, health, work, and so forth. Worldwide, women’s writing embeds these realities, in their past, present, and future formations. But I do believe that our approach to women writers needs to broaden considerably through the development of different frameworks and paradigms for putting writers who happen to be women into the same category: the category of “women writers.”

This is exactly the dilemma that Mary Eagleton and I have faced in starting up a new Oxford University Press journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing, which deals with women’s writing after 1970 across a variety of genres and with a plenitude of methodologies for reading. Although the journal is published (hard copy and on line) in English, we aim to be as fully transnational and multilingual in the women writers discussed and as international in our boards and contributors as we can encourage people to be. The first issue featured a free-ranging forum of feminists from six countries, while Mary and I opened the issue with an editorial statement reflecting on the excitements devolving from the instability of each word in the journal’s title: what does “contemporary” mean as a literary historical period that is ever-expanding, or for women whose writing spans the divide, or for writing that engages intextually with earlier traditions? What is a “woman” in the context of transgender and queer studies of gender identity, and to what extent can we discuss women writers in isolation from male writers? And what is “writing” in an increasingly digital age with the rise of visual culture and literacy and with the blending of “high” and “low” forms of creative expression in words? In the essays we have published and received as submissions, the borders between temporal periods, genders, and media or genres of “writing” are often highly porous. With all this flux, what is the rationale for the category “women’s writing” for the 21^st century?

The first step to building a new rationale for “women’s writing” is to embrace the rich potential for feminist work in exploring all the ways that the category of “women” is not a pre-existing a priori entity, is anything but fixed and certain, and is often in fact under intense scrutiny as to its viability and meaning. Transnational and race studies, poststructuralist theory, queer and transgender studies, bioculture studies, and digital studies—all assert the instability of the category “woman” or “women” even as they continue to use it, amend it, morph it, and otherwise pressure it. And therein lie possibilities for innovation and new frontiers in all subfields of women’s writing—whatever the temporal or geographical boundaries.

The second step in reconstituting the category “women’s writing” is to move beyond the implicit assumption that the main justification for the category of women writers is women’s collective identity as women marginalized by various axes of power and shared experience as women (or subsets of women). Instead, I suggest that we define women’s writing as writing by women rather than writing about being women. This definition opens up discussion of all the myriad dimensions of women’s writing, some of which may engage with gender or being women, and some of which may not. This definition also fosters the reading or staging of dialogues among women writers—women as individuals, as well as women as members of different and often multiple communities—whether such collectivities are compelled or chosen. This definitional approach means that the ground of what is feminist in our criticism of women writers may shift to become multi-layered. The feminism of our gynocriticism may continue to reside in our feminist analysis of what women write about being women or about gender. But the feminism in work on women writers may also reside in our continued insistence that women writers be addressed, that women writers not drop out of critical and theoretical discourse—as they can do with frightening rapidity in many cutting edge critical discourses.

Some might well argue that defining women’s writing simply as (any) writing by women represents a retreat from feminism, a dilution of the radical edge of feminist criticism that forcibly inserted women as a subject of inquiry and site for political action into the academy. I don’t think so, nor do I mean it to be. I see this broadening of feminist criticism as a supplement to not a replacement of feminist criticism that examines what women have written about gender, the gender inflection of their work, and gender’s intersection with other identity components. I see what I am asking for here as an updated version of a fundamental contradiction in A Room of One’s Own, where Woolf simultaneously asks us to pay attention to the difference in women’s writing as produced by the effects of long-term patriarchy (Woolf, 1929: Chapter 5) and at the same time asks for women to write as women but not necessarily about being women (Woolf, 1929: Chapter 6). Feminist criticism too can retain an awareness that the forces that marginalize, trivialize, or forget women writers are alive and well, resulting in the need to maintain the category “women writers” in our work and at the same time produce theory and criticism of women writers that is not exclusively focused on their gender, their oppression as women, or their shared experience as women or subsets of women.

Whither Feminist Literary Theory?

 The sea change in the feminist criticism of women writers has brought with it a troubling marginalization of literary theory within feminist theory.  I am puzzled by how little feminist literary theory is part of the map of feminist theory today—and I mean specifically feminist literary or aesthetic theory, feminist poetics, that is feminist theory that explicitly addresses issues of representation in language, narrative, figuration, generic forms and so forth. Feminist literary/aesthetic theory used to be central to feminist theory in general; now, it is marginal at best, hardly being written at all.[6] Feminist theory about popular or mass culture abounds, but the theoretical terrain of the literary has been largely abandoned.  Why? I’m not sure. Can we begin to forge a new feminist poetics that deals with both the divides and the porous borderlands between literary and other verbal cultures? Between print and digital media? Between verbal and visual forms of creativity? Between the written on the one hand and the oral and performative on the others (e.g. the Spoken Word feminist movement in performed poetry)? Between radical experimentalisms and the continued power globally of the accessible story told or lyric recited? Between the fluid bodies of the human/posthuman and the corpus of symbolic representations? Or perhaps what we need is a new feminist poetics of literature and transnationalism, biocultures and the environment, transgendered and queer, newer ways of thinking about embodiment than the old nature/nurture debates. Somehow, we need 21^st century feminist theoretical formulations about semiotic and representational dimensions of the new cutting edges of cultural theory and criticism.

Globalizing the Study of Women Writers

Second, I have been, like many, troubled at how the current theoretical discourses of globalization—transnationalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora and migration studies—often “forget” the difference that gender makes, or forget to mention women altogether. The speed with which women often drop out of the hottest new theoretical frameworks literally takes my breath away. Of course in each of these fields, there are feminists doing important work. Nonetheless, feminist theoretical discourses in global studies remain relatively marginalized within these “hot” fields. I would hope to see more feminist theoretical work developing around issues of women’s writing in global perspective.  What I suggest in the absence of such theory is a brief and schematic naming of four strategies for feminist transnational gynocriticism and theory. All of these strategies challenge the older models of national literary studies—including gynocritical ones—based on defining what is distinctive or exceptional about literatures produced within the nation or within the boundaries of the nation-state. They also involve bringing the dialectical and relational discourses of the global and the local into play: the global in the local; the local in the global; and the interplay of the two.

The first strategy involves rereading long-recovered women writers from a single national culture—e.g., British women writers—within a transnational frame. The nation-state remains a significant category, but the focus shifts to recognizing the links of literature within the nation to other geohistorical locations and cultural productions. This strategy foregrounds travel writing, porous borders, migration, and empire. As Gayatri Spivak so famously demonstrated in her reading of Jane Eyre (and before her, Said, in his reading of Jane Austen), the footsteps of empire are everywhere present in the writers of Britain (Spivak, 1991; Said, 1993). Even more recently, the formation of Britain through England’s conquest or colonization of the British Isles has led to cutting edge work on Scottish and Irish women writers in particular.

The second transnational gynocritical strategy is additive—the new geographies of women’s writing in regions of the world hitherto marginal to feminist gynocriticism. This approach recognizes that every margin constitutes its own center of cultural production. The study of women writers in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are in particular huge and exciting growth areas in feminist criticism, often requiring multilingual knowledge and attention to questions of colonialism, globalization, migration, and so forth. Feminist criticism on women’s writing outside the “West” is seeing something of the same phenomenon that is evident in feminist theory and activism more generally—namely, the move from the West to the non-West of the major energy and innovative leadership in global feminism.[7]  What may seem old-fashioned in British or American studies can be cutting edge in other parts of the world, with new questions and theories developing out of the different geohistorical realities of women’s lives and writing—approaches which can in turn reinvigorate readings of British and American women’s writing. These new questions combine well with the familiar methodologies of feminist gynocriticism—such as canon deformation, reformation, and dissolution; the archaeological spade work of recovery; the intersectional analysis of gender’s articulation through other identity categories; the myriad theoretical and historical gynocritical methodologies, from psychoanalytic, to formalist, materialist, historicist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, and so forth. The new feminist criticism of women writers outside the West is hybrid, blending old and new feminist questions.

The third strategy foregrounds the significance for women’s writing of world-wide contact zones, interculturalism, and the global flows of people, cultural practices, ideas, technology, capital, and militaries. Circulation of texts as well as people and goods has itself become an object of study, drawing on the concepts of dynamic and interactive cultures in anthropology and the new spatiality of social theory. This strategy challenges the older diffusionist model of cultural transmission based on center/periphery or metropole/colony. Instead, it promotes a polycentric and conjunctural approach that assumes multiple agencies and what Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan term “scattered hegemonies” on a global landscape (Grewel and Kaplan, 1994). Adapting seminal essays by Edward Said (1983, “Traveling Theory”) and James Clifford (1992, “Traveling Cultures”), I have, for example, been developing a theory of women’s intertextuality that examines global circulations of women’s texts and their indigenizations as readers elsewhere adapt, transplant, revise and make their own elements of women’s writing that come to them from abroad (Friedman, 2005, “Migration, Encounter, and Indigenisation”). This assumes a textual dialogue of women writers operating at two levels—first, a direct conversation of writers who are readers of women from elsewhere; second, the critic who puts women writers from different parts of the world in conversation with each other at the level of reading.[8]

The fourth strategy is a broadly comparative one on a planetary landscape. Comparison is itself undergoing transformation, coming under considerable political critique as a mode of analysis that assumes a defining center to which others—that is, peripheries—are compared. If British women’s writing—let’s say, Jane Eyre for the female Bildungsroman—constitutes the standard against which others texts like Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions are measured, then comparison reasserts a potentially colonial logic based on a center/periphery world system in the realm of letters. A newer comparative approach might examine how Dangarembga’s narrative of development both illuminates colonial relations between Britain and Rhodesia and also sheds light on the earlier British text. Other older methods of comparison—like identification of similarities and differences or tracing a motif or pattern through different texts—are being supplanted by newer modes of comparison. Identification of similarities and differences tends to deterritorialize and dehistoricize what is being compared, as qualities are taken out of their milieu and brought into a seemingly neutral zone for comparison.[9] To avoid these problems, I have been experimenting with a comparative strategy I call cultural collage or cultural parataxis—that is, the radical juxtaposition of texts from different parts of the world to see what reading them in tandem reveals about each of them individually and about larger structures in which they both participate (Friedman, 2003, “Modernism in a Transnational Landscape”; Friedman, 2005, “Paranoia”).

One such collage I have been working on breaks national, generic, spatial, and temporal boundaries in a juxtaposition of texts by women in which food centers prominently in stories of girls growing into women: Marilyn Hornbacker’s Wasted, a U.S. memoir of bulimia and aneroxia in upper-middle class America; Medea Benjamin’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, an oral history of Elvia Alvarado, a campesina fighting for land rights so that women can feed their children; and Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, a novel of hunger for education in a postcolonial setting in which food and the adolescent female body become a site for conflict between father and daughter. Each text’s engagement with food in the context of female Bildung needs to be read in its local geohistorical context, but put together in radical juxtaposition, the three women’s texts in sharply contrasting modes of writing raise startling questions about women’s human rights and the relationship of food to those rights.

Conclusion

To close briefly, I call for the demarginalization of feminist theory and criticism of women writers by revisiting our rationale for the category of women writers, by defining women’s writing as writing by women, and by embracing many of the new critical discourses that have seemed most threatening to the feminist criticism of women writers. I take this threatened marginalization as a challenge to rethink what we mean by “women writers,” to retheorize the poetics of women’s writing in the context of new theoretical frameworks, and to recenter our field on a planetary landscape of women’s writing worldwide.

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One book on digital humanities?

Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies and director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works in the fields of modernist studies, gender and feminist studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies, comparative world literatures, narrative theory, and women's poetry and writing. She is co-editor of the new Oxford University Press journal Contemporary Women's Writing, and she is the author of Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D., Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction and Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. She also edited Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle, Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, and Signets—Reading H.D. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Serbian. She is at work on books on modernism and on migration.

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
juillet/ décembre 2008 -julho/dezembro 2008