WOMEN WRITING ACROSS CULTURES

build bridges, not walls

The reader will swiftly conclude – having glanced through the Contents, the names of contributors, and essay titles – that this is a thoroughly international, multicultural, multilingual collection. Nevertheless, the reader is no doubt aware that the terms comprising the title of the collection are highly contested, their meaning far from obvious or descriptive. Indeed, it is the aim of this collection and of my Introduction to ask what these terms might mean and how they might be used. We are seeking to question and retheorize “woman,” “writing,” “women’s writing” and “across.” And we will be translating “culture” into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. For example, how might one write across national cultures or across a national and a minority culture or across disciplines, genres and media or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses?

Let's begin with “woman,” particularly in the context of feminist, queer and transgender theory and criticism, but also aesthetic practice. Back in 1993 Judith Butler proposed that “it remains politically necessary to lay claim to ‘women,’” and other such terms, “precisely because of the way these terms, as it were, lay their claim on us” – for example, in their “deployments in racist and misogynist discursive regimes” (20).¹ In 2009 Toril Moi argued that the claim “I am not a woman writer” is “always in response to a provocation, usually to someone who has tried to use her sex or gender against her […] a specific kind of defensive act […] once someone has been taken to be a woman” (7).² But she added that “it is simply wrong to believe that the word “woman” always and without exception has the same, conventional, conservative meaning, regardless of who is speaking and in what context” (8). In 2016, during the US presidential election campaign, far too many voters seemed more comfortable with women as the object of abusive “locker room talk” than with women as politicians.

In the ongoing effort to democratize and pluralize “woman,” it is neither necessary nor desirable to assume the priority of gender over race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. In response to Wendy Brown, I suggest that feminist scholarship does not require the priority of gender as its “firm foundation” or its “core” (30).³ Does scholarship require a core at all? Robyn Wiegman called for a feminist scholarship that embraces “contingency and unknowability”: willingness to denaturalize its object, “women” – “that there might be ‘no there there’” – interdisciplinarity, self-reflexivity, openness to the future.⁴ Rejecting a facile pluralism that multiplies “definable categories” of women and assumes “recognizability,” Afsaneh Najmabadi called for “unavailable intersections.”⁵ Najmabadi proposed names that defy definition, such as “secular Muslim feminist.”⁶ Back in 1984 Chandra Mohanty famously rejected the essentialism of the category “Third World Woman.”⁷ But while the critique of essentialism dominated feminist debates for decades, contemporary debates in feminist, queer and transgender theory are moving beyond the false dilemma or double bind of essentialism vs. social constructionism. Continuing anti-essentialism goes hand-in-hand with what I would call a friendly critique of social constructionism, for example in Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman ⁸ or in research biologist and feminist theorist Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. ⁹ The background for Regenia Gagnier's essay in this collection is indeed the “loop of nature, culture, and technology,” as she calls it. Her innovative “symbiological approach” to literature, outlined in her piece, emerged in the context of a collective interdisciplinary research project across the humanities and the life sciences. It is indebted to, among others, the work of biologist and gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling.

In literary studies, my own discipline, academic feminist literary criticism since the late 1960s has endowed us with “women’s writing” and “literature by women” as legitimate scholarly terms and fields. See, for example, journals such as Women's Writing and Contemporary Women's Writing;¹⁰ or the 2007 two-volume third edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, compiled by pioneers Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar; or the monumental ten-volume, multi-editor book series The History of British Women's Writing, which began publishing in 2010.¹¹ This collection includes scholarship on the following women novelists, playwrights and poets, writing in a variety of languages, some of them “greats” of the literary canon, most of them contemporary and emerging: Antonia Baum, Eavan Boland, Nina Bouraoui, Angela Carter, Hélène Cixous, Robin Coste Lewis, Julia Darling, Bernardine Evaristo, Conceição Evaristo, U.A. Fanthorpe, Janice Galloway, Ana Maria Gonçalves, Velina Hasu Houston, Helene Hegemann, Jackie Kay, Barbara Köhler, Gwyneth Lewis, Adriana Lisboa, Clarice Lispector, Toni Morrison, Sharona Muir, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Priya Parmar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tatiana Salem Levy, Carol Satyamurti, Jo Shapcott, and Virginia Woolf.

Research in women's writing in the last fifty years has been largely organized by national context or by language. Partly to address the limitations of these approaches, recent scholarship has been strongly transnationalist in orientation. To capture transnational networks and identities more fully and sensitively, a theoretical/methodological shift has been taking place – towards theorizing linguistic and cultural “translation,” and the relation between cultural “centre” and “periphery” or “margin,” but also towards theorizing mixed-race identities that do not fit into existing identity-categories and that question the very process of categorization itself. In this collection, many contributors develop transnational perspectives – focusing on France and Algeria (Mona El Khoury), the United States and Japan (Eriko Hara), Japan and the United Kingdom (Natsumi Ikoma), Portugal and the United Kingdom (Cláudia Pazos-Alonso), and the black diaspora (Tessa Roynon). Pazos-Alonso examines, for the first time, the “pioneer early feminism” of progressive Portuguese periodicals A Voz Feminina and O Progresso (1868–69) in relation to transnational women's networks and transnational debates on women's suffrage. She reconstructs the connections between Principal Editor Francisca Wood and her collaborators with “key radical figures such as Lydia Becker in England, Marie Goegg in Switzerland and André Léo in France.” She suggests that Francisca Wood “may have been behind […] the (unsigned and incomplete) first translation of Jane Eyre into Portuguese” from 1877 onwards. Countering Wood's “invisibility at the point of her death,” Pazos-Alonso reappraises Wood's role in transnational cultural history. Natsumi Ikoma, in the midst of recent strongly renewed interest in Angela Carter, investigates a gap in Carter scholarship, Carter's years in Japan (1969–72). With “original information drawn from interviews with Carter’s former Japanese boyfriend, combined with the examination of [Carter’s] unpublished journal entries,” Ikoma reconstructs the impact of Carter's close encounter with all aspects of Japanese life and culture – from her love life to her readings in Japanese literature – on her work, especially on the evolution of her feminist thinking and experimental novelistic practice. Eriko Hara focuses on the transnationalism of Asian-American playwright Velina Hasu Houston and her explorations of “cultural collision and coalescence in transnational communities.” Discussing Houston's work since Tea (1987), especially Calligraphy (2010), Hara highlights Houston's insights into “women’s memories,” old age, dementia, and processes of “aging from both Japanese and American perspectives.” Houston’s transnationalist feminist “politics of life,” argues Hara, thus creates an innovative “viewpoint through which to look at Japan, the United States and the world” – that of the “transformative nature of cultural identity and change” – and “inspires [Houston] to re-envision women’s writing.”

However, what is “women’s writing” after all? Is it (great) literature by those assigned female at birth or by those who identify as women? Or addressed primarily to those assigned female at birth or those who identify as women? Or influenced by “women” or situated within women's literary traditions? Or feminist in the broadest sense? Or necessarily one of the above? This collection certainly advocates an inclusive understanding of “writing,” in keeping with the poststructuralist theorization of “text” and “intertextuality” by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. The collection places (great) literature within a continuum of “texts” of all sorts: film (María Donapetry) and painting (Aliki Krikidi); women's pages (Mariela E. Méndez) and blogs (Alison Winch); manuscript Chinese women's writing, nüshu (Fei-wen Liu); manuscript diaries (Cynthia Aalders); talking in the psychoanalytic encounter (Louise Gyler); and group singing (Kim Treiger-Bar-Am). But this collection also strongly endorses literature as having a vital role within the continuum (see Jane Dowson), including difficult, experimental literature (see Georgina Paul), and invites literary practitioners to reflect on their practice (see Lauren Grodstein and Kirsty Gunn). Yet it insists on making connections between “great” literature, non-literary texts and life (see Morag Shiach). So what I have described as a writing continuum can alternatively be described as a writing-across.

Before going on to discuss the idea of “across” that is in the title of this collection and running through it, let me ask once again: (how) can women's writing be theorized? In this collection, philosophers Sylvie Gambaudo and Talia Bettcher and psychoanalyst Louise Gyler offer ways to pose the question. Gambaudo eschews established terms such as “women’s writing” in favour of her neologism “woman writing.” Aiming to formulate a non-essentialist definition of “woman writing,” she turns to the work of Kristeva and Butler for the tools to understand what a “woman writing” practice might be. Continuing her feminist critique of psychoanalysis, Gyler here challenges the idea of a “simple linear progression from the pre-Oedipal to the Oedipal” and the “centrality given to the Oedipus complex and the associated paternal function” in the psychoanalytic account of the “processes involved in entering the symbolic realm.” She goes on to outline what might be described as a maternal-symbolic function – what Gyler calls the “symbolization of an inner receptive space” as a precondition for thought. Bettcher, in conversation with Pelagia Goulimari, discusses her substantial contributions to transgender theory and theorizes “woman” and “writing” from a trans feminist perspective. In the context of wider debates in feminist, queer and transgender theory, Bettcher and Goulimari ask how (not) to theorize “woman,” “trans woman” and “trans woman of colour” but also how (not) to theorize “experience,” “local knowledge,” and communication across worlds. They explore aesthetic experiments crossing the boundaries between theory, literature and life-writing, and their connection to an intersectional ethics of closeness. Bettcher goes on to outline her concept of intimacy and “interpersonal spatiality,” developing the work of philosopher María Lugones on communication across “worlds.”

I will now turn to “across,” as theorized and practised in this collection. I will begin by situating it in relation to contemporary feminist theory, particularly the so-called New Materialist feminisms. The word “across” points to a cluster of concepts developed in this field: the transversal, the nomadic, the rhizomatic, the in between, assemblage, entanglement, intra-action. I am alluding to the evolving work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Dorothea Olkowski and others, since the 1980s.¹² In this body of work, the emphasis is often on the “posthuman” crossing of the boundaries between the human and the non-human natural world, and between nature, culture and technology – as addressed by Gagnier in this collection. But the collection develops the idea of “across” in a number of other directions. Transnationalism, as discussed above, is one of them, suggesting a spatial understanding of “across.”

Yet another direction is a temporal understanding of “across” that I call transtemporal, distinguishing somewhat artificially between: present & past and present & future. To begin with the former, several pieces in this collection pursue the connection between present & past in innovative ways. One of the strongest themes in postcolonial and African-American literature by women has been that of traumatic memory, and the pieces here by Claire Williams, Mona El Khoury and Jean Wyatt contribute to its ongoing theorization. Tessa Roynon focuses on another strong theme in these fields: the reconstruction of black female subjectivity and retrieval of agency through intertextual “revoicing” of the past. In particular, Williams analyses four contemporary novels by Brazilian women writers, which “trace back” historical “trauma” to the “impact and legacy of slavery on contemporary society.” The four texts by Adriana Lisboa, Conceição Evaristo, Ana Maria Gonçalves and Tatiana Salem Levy return to “shockingly brutal events which seem to prove wrong the myths of gentle colonization and harmonious racial democracy.” Williams analyses how, narrating “from the point of view of the most vulnerable member of colonial society: the enslaved African woman,” these writers “claim justice for their characters and remind readers that those excluded from official histories had names, faces and voices.” Highlighting “women’s history, visibility, individuality, legacy and heroism” will “enable healing from trauma in the present.” El Khoury, on the other hand, highlights the intractable intergenerational transmission of trauma. El Khoury focuses on Nina Bouraoui's métis (mixed-race) Franco-Algerian identity “as presented in her autobiographical novels,” Garçon manqué [Tomboy] and Mes mauvaises pensées [My Bad/Evil Thoughts]. El Khoury's psychoanalytic reading draws synthetically on Marianne Hirsch's concept of “postmemory,” Teresa Brennan on the transmission of affect, psychiatrist Judith Herman, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan, psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, critic Nadine Fresco and others. El Khoury explores a “contradiction at work” in Bouraoui's texts: “while reclaiming the existence of a Franco-Algerian métis identity, Bouraoui represents the métis as the incarnated perpetuation of the historical tensions that divided France and Algeria.” Close reading shows Bouraoui's “embodied memory of the colonial fracture”: for example, how “traumatic memories of asphyxiation are a metaphor for Bouraoui’s difficult relationship with her French self.” Rather than healing, Bouraoui thus provides a “problematic acceptance” of her métis identity. Roynon's essay compares and evaluates three texts by black women writers whose “strategies for rewriting the past include a revisionary engagement with the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome”: Bernardine Evaristo, Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Robin Coste Lewis. Each text “protests the historic oppression” of women of colour and “asserts a black female agency” which is predicated on a “transnational conception of black identity” and the interconnections between Africa, Europe and the Americas. Each text invokes “the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome, the legacies of which underpinned” colonialism. However, Roynon argues, “those by Evaristo and Lewis (in part through their strategy of engaging with the traditions of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Sudan) ultimately constitute works of greater subversive power than does that of Philip.”

Continuing with the transtemporal connection between present & past developed in this collection, historian Cynthia Aalders and legal theorist Kim Treiger-Bar-Am focus their essays on women's religious experience and active, dynamic participation in religious traditions. Braidotti and others have described the “post-secular” turn in feminism¹³ and, in this field, Saba Mahmood's feminist theorizing – in her essay “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent” – has been hugely influential, particularly in reconceptualizing and retrieving female agency and subjectivity.¹⁴ Aalders examines Jane Attwater's manuscript diary between 1766 and 1834, the most extensive diary written by a Nonconformist woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aalders's piece contributes to the methodologically innovative field of women's history: retrieving the archivist role of women's often manuscript texts in the construction of historical memory beyond “official” history.¹⁵ This field is interconnected with the feminist questioning of the private–public distinction, and Aalders describes the intergenerational dialogue of women addressing each other across four generations of their extended family. While also contributing to current work in the new field of Material Text, Aalders describes the text of Attwater's diaries as a palimpsest with embedded fossils. (In this collection, Mariela E. Méndez and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso also contribute to Material Text scholarship with their archival work, attending to the more material aspects of their texts – newspapers and periodicals respectively.) Treiger-Bar-Am sets out to theorize what she calls “renewal within tradition” in relation to the Women of the Wall in Jerusalem, who have been praying collectively in song, in spite of thirty years of hostility. Treiger-Bar-Am builds her defence of the Women through recourse to Kantian democratic theory and Jewish thought. Jewish and Kantian thought are compared and “seen to conceptualize the essence of freedom as obligation, from which arise duties of respect for the other. Duties of respect indeed are owed” to the Women. Further, she demonstrates the radical pluralism and openness to interpretation of Jewish thought – a pluralism that is open to the future, and effectively met halfway by the Women's rejuvenation of Jewish traditions.

In developing transtemporal perspectives that rethink temporality, queer theory has made an enormous contribution in the last decades, theorizing a queer temporality against “patrilinearity” – see especially the work of Sara Ahmed, Lee Edelman, J. Jack Halberstam and others.¹⁶ This work is especially asking us to rethink inheritance, succession, success and failure, and the connection between present & future. In this collection, the piece by Emily Spiers contributes to this field. Spiers explores the temporality of four recent German-language texts by women writers: two “pop-feminist” texts and two “complex first-person novels.” Spiers argues that the former texts – Wir Alpha-Mädchen [We Alpha-Girls] and Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] – deploy a temporality of “linear progress” to “consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future.” By contrast, the latter – Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill and Antonia Baum's Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] – convey “disorientation” (as theorized by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology) and a queer “asynchronous temporality.” Their “queer disruptions […] throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind […] the self-empowered ‘individual’” of the pop-feminist texts. Spiers contends that their “queer refusal of normative futures,” as theorized by Halberstam, “allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.” Of course, to praise queer temporality for its unprecedented novelty and originality in relation to previous theories of temporality would be to repeat the very pattern of progressive linearity that queer theory has so strongly criticized. Indeed, Morag Shiach's discussion of temporality in Virginia Woolf, in this collection, shows that a theory and practice of queer temporality has been with us at least since modernism. Similarly, Mariela E. Méndez examines Clarice Lispector's women's pages in Brazilian newspapers between 1959 and 1961, “crafted under a pseudonym,” which have “hardly received any critical attention.” Méndez argues that “through their nuanced parody” of “comparable discursive spaces” that commodify gender and their “overemphasis on what is culturally constructed as feminine,” Lispector's women's pages “perform a transvestite gesture that unsettles normative models of femininity and dislodges a heteronormative temporality predicated upon birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” (Méndez's discussion of “transvestism” draws on Marjorie Garber.)

Developing the transtemporal connection between present & future, Alison Winch's piece, on the other hand, pursues a post-Marxist orientation to theorize temporality, proposing the concept of “conjuncture” and a “conjunctural” analysis as developed by Antonio Gramsci, and in a contemporary British context by Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, recently towards an understanding of neoliberalism.¹⁷ Winch proposes a conjunctural analysis of intergenerational feminism and intergenerational conflict, focusing on blogging, Millennials and the Hip Hop generation in the United States and the United Kingdom. Winch's conjunctural analysis insistently includes a feminist intersectional approach, proposing a “conjunctural and intersectional” understanding of generation – one that explores how feminist “generational identity intersects with categories of race, gender, class, sexuality and place.” Julia Novak's contribution to this volume is asking how to think the relation between feminism and postfeminism, particularly in the context of biographical novels about historical women artists, which “have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years.” Comparing Janice Galloway's Clara (2002) and Priya Parmar's Exit the Actress (2011), Novak argues that they “differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate, and, hence, in their gender politics.”

Yet another understanding of “across” in this collection has to do with moving across distinct discourses, e.g., distinct disciplines. It is obvious that this collection is interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary. It includes work in: anthropology, film theory, history, legal theory, literary criticism, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and visual art. Essays also engage with disciplines outside the Arts and Humanities: biology, the life sciences, medicine, neuroscience, and quantum physics. But some pieces specifically explore or reflect on the space in between discourses. Anthropology, having been the discipline perhaps most obviously tainted by colonialism and power inequalities in the relationship between researchers and research participants – and therefore inequalities in the interaction between the discourses of researcher and participant – has had to develop an acute self-reflexivity to address this legacy. Here, feminist anthropology has made an important contribution.¹⁸ Fei-wen Liu's piece in this collection is exemplary in its ethics of self-reflexivity, as an inextricable part of Liu's ethnographic research into southern rural Chinese women's unique “expressive tradition,” written in their own women's script, nüshu. Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Liu “traces the trajectory of nüshu’s evolving function and social meanings” from “communication platform” and transformative “social forum” to “academic property” and “government-supervised profession,” calling for a “rethinking of where nüshu,” now multiply endangered, “might be heading.” Jane Dowson's piece addresses power inequalities in the relationship between doctor and patient and their respective discourses, and the role of women's (experimental) poetry – in its very polysemy – in voicing the patient's experience of illness. Discussing poems by women about cancer and depression over the last fifty years, Dowson claims that their “non-verbal features,” particularly “metaphors and symbols, mark the space of what a patient cannot fully articulate,” but also remind “the reader – or health professional – that interiority can never be fully presented.” Dowson thus contributes to the new field of Medical Humanities.

While critiquing power inequalities between discourses, this volume also takes part in the search for ethical alternatives. Bettcher and Goulimari's discussion of recent experiments, in feminist writing, that cross the boundaries between life-writing, theory and literature, focuses on the ethics of these genre-crossing aesthetic experiments. Jean Wyatt outlines the evolution of Toni Morrison's work towards a more participatory role for the reader and enhanced collaboration between writer and reader. Wyatt shows how Morrison's later novels use formal and structural means to “draw out a reader’s assumptions” and “prompt the reader to examine and re-evaluate them.” The engagement with “a reader’s own values in an ethical dialogue with the text” is Morrison's “variation on the tradition of call-and-response central to African American art forms.” This is mirrored in the way in which Morrison theorizes love in the later novels: as a “disruptive force that produces profound change” or as “something you innovate and recreate each moment,” Wyatt writes. María Donapetry's piece focuses on three feminist Spanish films – by Dunia Ayaso and Félix Sabroso, Icíar Bollaín, and Isabel Coixet – which construct scenes of female nudes that self-reflexively address the representation of the female nude in film and other art forms. These are films “precisely about the relationship between art and the living woman, between the creative exercises of film, painting and photography and their ethical engagement with the individual,” and Donapetry “elucidates the ethical rules of engagement with the spectators the directors propose, particularly in regard to the commodification of the female body.” Donapetry goes on to outline and advocate a feminist ethical perspective built on ambiguity and the spectator's freedom, developing the work of Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater. One of the major themes in this collection is the interaction, the in between writer or speaker or analysand and reader or audience or analyst as well as the in between writing or speaking and active reading or listening: see also the pieces by Cynthia Aalders, Louise Gyler, Fei-wen Liu, and Georgina Paul.

Student representatives of the Oxford M.St. in Women's Studies recently proposed a policy of asking students which pronouns they use – he, she or they? (Feminist) protocols of respectful social interaction seem to be moving towards self-identification, uncoupled from gender presentation and (any assumptions about) the gender one was assigned at birth. In literature and literary criticism in the aftermath of the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there were calls to prioritize female characters and audiences. For example, Alice Walker called for dark-skinned black women characters, traditionally underrepresented, even in African-American literature.¹⁹ Most of Toni Morrison's novels return to her theme of friendship among black women and girls, while she has been programmatically addressing primarily an audience of black women, and has criticized the beginning of her novel, Sula, for failing to do so.²⁰ The project of articulating marginalized female subjectivities and identities is far from complete and, in this collection, Claire Williams cites research to show how seriously underrepresented Afro-Brazilian women are in contemporary Brazilian literature.²¹ This does not mean at all that women writers should be limited to writing female characters or writing from a female perspective or through a female focalizer. Indeed, in this collection, Lauren Grodstein and Kirsty Gunn discuss their practice of writing male characters or writing from a male perspective. Grodstein describes the clash between her writing experience and critics' assumptions. Grodstein's own writing experience has been that “the success of creating a thoroughly constructed fictional human being often resides in that character’s otherness”; writing from a male perspective has freed her to “fully imagine […] another human being,” thus “rendering the whole enterprise of creating a fictional character more possible.” By contrast, critics have been commenting on the “unlikelihood” of her decision to write about a man in the first person, labelling her “ventriloquist.” That no one questioned her authority and credibility in writing parenting scenes or scenes of medical consultation simply highlighted for Grodstein the undue, unreflective and “stifling” critical attention to her gender, “as though the imagining of a young woman couldn’t approach middle-aged male truth.” The intractability of such critical attitudes after more than a century of modernist literary experiments with voice (e.g., going back to Emily Dickinson) is difficult to ignore; as is some publishers' crude stereotyping of femininity – in the colour palette of book covers for some literature by women, for example.

Morag Shiach's piece in this collection details Woolf's experiments with gender and life-writing “on or about” 1930, and Woolf's efforts to rethink their intersection with wider political problems. Shiach's interdisciplinary attention to a “diverse range of texts” in a “cultural moment” is indebted to Woolf's own experiments with temporality and critique of progressive linearity but also resonates, in my view, with the recent critique of patrilinearity in favour of the queer moment in queer theory (discussed above). Shiach studies pronominal “tension,” “ambiguity” and “strain” in Woolf: discontinuous shifts from “his” to “her” to “their” in Orlando; the “unstable and precarious subjectivity” of the first-person singular “I” in The Waves where “one moment does not lead to another” (Woolf), challenging “any notion of life-writing”; and especially Woolf’s lesser-known Preface to a collective publication by the Women's Co-operative Guild, Life As We Have Known It. In this Preface in the form of a letter, Woolf oscillates between a “very tentative” first-person “I” and the “gender-neutral and class-specific” pronoun “one”; she also juxtaposes temporalities to further destabilize “the letter writer’s subjectivity” and to perform a “failure” of identification.²² Georgina Paul's piece in this collection discusses an intensification of such modernist experiments, Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife]. Köhler not only re-accents Homer's Odyssey away from Odysseus and towards a “web” of women characters, she also, argues Paul, performs a pronominal shift:

from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to the polyvalent pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader […] into a quantum universe of plural probabilities.

Köhler's practice of polysemy – deviating from the “sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition” – generates “intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship.” Kirsty Gunn theorizes her own evolving literary practice of writing male protagonists who are looking at women who are looking at them, as a “breaking open (of) the gaze”: the “fracturing of a singular point of view into a multiple one, a seeing and a being seen […] energizing and transforming the roles of both male and female characters.” In Gunn's work traditional male protagonists are “at the centre of texts that are actually female in perspective, so allowing for the reader to have the experience of a sort of inversion of reading.” In this process, “the traditional male becomes someone else, the male gaze transported to another kind of looking” that prioritizes “female agency.” We might perhaps read Gunn as D.H. Lawrence's undutiful feminist daughter.

This collection started its life as part of University of Oxford research networks. Early versions of many essays were initially delivered as papers in three contexts: the ongoing Gender, Literature and Culture research seminar which I have been co-convening since 2011;²³ the Oxford TORCH Interdisciplinary Research Group, “Reopening the Question: ‘What is Women’s Writing?’”;²⁴ and an international three-day conference, “Women Writing Across Cultures: Past, Present, Future” at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford, 26–28 September 2014.²⁵ The pieces I selected for inclusion in this collection are intended to capture or allude to broader tendencies in current research, as sketched out in this Introduction. But in order to point to as many directions in emerging research as possible, some of the essays were especially commissioned. The collection is an assemblage whose essays are mobile parts each putting ambiguously, tentatively, uncertainly in process a number of terms: woman, writing, across … But these terms are also produced by creative intersections, conjunctions and collisions between the essays. In this Introduction I have suggested ways to put the mobile parts together. It is now up to the reader to take over and reassemble the collection and its terms anew.

December 2016

Oxford, UK and Xanthi, Greece

Notes

I am grateful to Gerard Greenway and James Hypher for their generous editorial support of this volume.

1 Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 1 (1993): 17–32.

2 Toril Moi, “‘I am not a woman writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today,” Eurozine (2009): 1–8, available <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-06-12-moi-en.html> (accessed 10 Sept. 2015). See also Moi, “What is a Woman?” in Moi, What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 3–120.

3 Wendy Brown, “The Impossibility of Women’s Studies” in Women's Studies on the Edge, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2008) 30.

4 Robyn Wiegman, “The Possibility of Women’s Studies” in Women's Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, eds. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers UP, 2005) 42, 54.

5 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Teaching and Research in Unavailable Intersections” in Women's Studies on the Edge 70–71.

6 Ibid. 77.

7 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12.3/13.1 (1984): 333–58.

8 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

9 Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville, CA: Seal, 2007).

10 Published by Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press respectively.

11 Published by Palgrave Macmillan.

12 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2007); and Interview with Karen Barad in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities, 2012), available <http://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/handle/1874/256718> (accessed 17 Aug. 2016). Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman; and Interview with Rosi Braidotti in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities, 2015); and Colebrook, Sex After Life: Essays on Extinction vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities, 2015). Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia UP, 2008); Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011); Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia UP, 2017). Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003); Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016). Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 2007).

13 Rosi Braidotti, “In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism,” Theory, Culture & Society 25.6 (2008): 1–24.

14 Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16.2 (2001): 202–36.

15 See, for example, Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini, and Paul Thompson, eds., Gender & Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).

16 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006). Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2004). Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York UP, 2005); and Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011). Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010).

17 Doreen Massey, “Ideology and Economics in the Present Moment” in The Neoliberal Crisis, eds. Sally Davison and Katharine Harris (London: Lawrence, 2015) 102–12.

18 See, for example, Ellen Lewin, ed., Feminist Anthropology: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

19 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt, 1983).

20 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” in The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 46ff.

21 See Claire Williams n. 7.

22 On “failure,” see Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure. Woolf seems to be anticipating and approaching Muñoz's concept of “(dis)identification.” José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1999).

23 I was sole convenor in 2011–12; my co-convenors were Dr Stephanie Clare and Prof. Tim Whitmarsh in 2012–13, Prof. Ros Ballaster and Prof. Cláudia Pazos-Alonso in 2013–16, and Prof. Ros Ballaster in 2016–17. Since 2015–16 the students of the Oxford M.St. in Women's Studies have also been actively involved. The seminar has been funded by the Faculties of English Language and Literature, Classics, and Medieval & Modern Languages since 2011 and Philosophy since 2014.

24 I was Co-ordinator – with Prof. Ros Ballaster, Prof. Cláudia Pazos-Alonso and Prof. Tim Whitmarsh – of this 2013–14 research programme. We organized nine seminars and three workshops in 2013–14.

25 My conference co-organizers were Prof. Ros Ballaster and Prof. Cláudia Pazos-Alonso. We were helped by Sarah Gabriel, Kathleen Lawton-Trask, Clare Morgan, Emily Spiers and Eve Worth. The conference was funded by TORCH.