IS THERE SUCH A THING AS “WOMAN WRITING”?

Abstract

The article revisits the idea that writing may be gendered and asks whether we can define what a “woman writing” practice might be. We do this through a comparative study of the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Both have expressed reservations about, even objected to, the essentializing of gender and therefore of writing as a woman. They have, however, provided us with useful tools to define what a non-essentialist understanding of “woman” might entail. The article proposes to do three things: first, to look at the way each author presents “woman” and what I term “woman writing” in their work; second, to find, beyond epistemic differences, the common grounds shared by the two authors; and third, to clarify the places where the two disagree. In a concluding part, we will highlight how that disagreement is reconciled in revisiting Kristeva’s and Butler’s use of loss in their apprehension of “woman,” allowing us to formulate a non-essentialist definition of “woman writing.”

Keywords:

• woman writing
• feminine
• narrative
• identity
• Kristeva
• Butler

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I refer the reader to my article “The Regulation of Gender in Menopause Theory” for further critical discussion on this matter.

2 In what follows, I shall use the Derridean term “phallocentric” to mean the privileging of masculine experience in the construction of meaning.

3 For an explanation of why we should talk about woman's primary homosexuality rather than lesbianism, see my “Julia Kristeva, ‘Woman's Primary Homosexuality’ and Homophobia.”

4 Kristeva terms the good father “loving father” to differentiate him from the stern and punishing Oedipal father (Kristeva, Le Génie féminin).