Editorial Statement
Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Contemporary Women's Writing offers a space where the field of contemporary
Contemporary Women's Writing offers a space where the field of contemporary women's writing can be explored, challenged, extended, and defined. Recognizing the richness of women's writing from across the world, we welcome discussion of all literatures, not only those written in English. We encourage as well the full panoply of scholarly approaches to women's writing—from the theoretical to the historical, from the formalist to the sociological, from the material to the cultural, from the stylistic to the linguistic, from the political to the ethical. We are not a creative writing journal, in the sense of publishing original poems or short stories, but we do recognize how writing may be innovative in its stylistic mode, at once, creative and critical. And we hope to foster interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative perspectives on contemporary women's writing.
In titling the journal Contemporary Women's Writing, we intend to stimulate consideration of how the field itself has changed over the past three decades or more. One of the many contradictions which bedevilled the explosion of interest in contemporary women's writing in the late 1970s was the curious alignment of global claims alongside a politically unsustainable narrowness. Thus, on the one hand, there was a sense that women's writing everywhere had been suppressed by patriarchal forces and, in truth, there was no shortage of evidence about women's illiteracy rates, their difficulty in getting into print, or the critical devaluing of what they did produce. The feminist criticism of the period would often refer to women's writing as "hidden," "silenced," "absent." Most dramatically, in Hélène Cixous’ iconic essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976), women's writing became a volcanic force waiting to erupt. Yet, on the other hand, the work that was published and popularized was—in terms of class, race, geography—highly selective and, overwhelmingly, the product of white, middle-class women from Britain, Europe, and North America. Conceptually too, arguments often moved between ultra-specific—looking for that unique and unifying characteristic within women's writing which would establish its difference from men's writing—and a breadth which, as Peggy Kamuf pointed out, produced "only tautological statements of dubious value: women's writing is writing signed by women" (1980).
More than thirty years on from this period, we want to attest to the continuing difficulty and yet productiveness and viability of this phrase "contemporary women's writing". Exploring its potential and problems will be both an explicit and implicit focus of this journal. In our inaugural double issue, we feature a Roundtable on Contemporary Women's Writing to spark some debate and the preliminary delineation of future directions for the field. Although this roundtable will not be regular feature for the journal, we hope this initial set of reflections will stimulate further theorization about the field in subsequent issues. To set the framework for debate, we offer a brief unraveling of the three terms of the journal's title—"contemporary," "women's," and "writing"—so as to give some indication of the work to be done.
Contemporary
By "contemporary" we mean, roughly, post 1970, though for writers of longevity—like Adrienne Rich, Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, or Flora Nwapa—one might well want to consider work that pre-dates 1970. Demarcating the period is, at once, a practical necessity and a trigger to critical questions. What are the conditions of late twentieth-century- and early twenty-first-century history that shape and reflect women's writing? Is the field defined predominantly by this phase of globalization, with its intensified movement of peoples, goods, money, cultural practices and products, and armies and the attendant cultural hybridities and ruptures such movements create? How do the forces of nationalism and transnationalism, of race, religion, and sexualities in a global landscape play out in women's writing? We are strongly conscious of the fraught global pressures contained in our historical moment and how spatial modes of thinking are integral to the concerns and metaphors of our times this historical moment. As Foucault predicted in his prescient essay, "Of Other Spaces" (1967, 1984), space has gained recent and compensatory cogency as a framework for analysis, not as an erasure of the temporal but as a necessary complement to it. One needs only to look at the essay titles in this collection to appreciate the central preoccupation with space, place, geography, and location.
Women's
Few now would consider "women" a self-evident category. We know too much about the differences between women, bolstered by structural and personal inequalities; we are too conscious of the problems in claiming a coherent identity; we are resistant to being defined only by sexual difference. Women, like men, are multiply positioned. A woman's identity and writing can never be understood within the single framework of sex/gender. Intersectional analysis, a cornerstone of feminist theory today, has necessarily changed the terrain of women's writing and our ways of exploring it. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, caste sexuality, body, nation, colonialism, and transnation—these and other constituents of identity mediate expressions and performance of gender.
Even the category of sex/gender falls apart at the slash. What, after all, is "a woman" in the context of transgendered phenomena? Should this journal examine work by MTF (male to female) transgendered writers, by FTM (female to male)? If there is not one sex but many and a spectrum of genders, what is contemporary women's writing? Certainly, women writers do not have to write all the time about gender or sexuality, about "being a woman," and the essays in this first issue are ample evidence of the range of interest. Nor does the focus on the woman writer necessitate discussions that isolate women from their affiliations with male writers; consideration of the male author can effectively illuminate the female author. Rather than move toward fixing the category of "women," we anticipate that the journal's implicit comparative reach will establish a conversation among diverse women, a dialog as open to challenges and conflict as affiliation and correspondence.
Writing
We intend for the journal to consider all literary genres and forms but we are also interested in how "the literary" as a concept might be questioned. Over thirty years ago, feminist criticism challenged normative understandings of the "literary" by incorporating ignored or undervalued genres such as letters, diaries, and autobiographies into the concept of women's writing. Today, such challenges need to continue, with new issues to face. For example, one person's serious literary fiction is the next person's "lit lite" (to use Debbie Taylor's 2006 coinage) or the next person's pulp fiction. The increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts. Moreover, we need to think of what writing means in a digitalized age where computers are revolutionizing knowledge production, dissemination, and the very ways in which people think, read, and write. The visual and the verbal, in a huge array of forms, are increasingly intermingled as the centuries-long dominance of print culture yields to the digital. Equally productive are those porous borders where writing works alongside other discourses and practices (art history, genetics, the social sciences, for instance) and such border-crossings may be as much concerned with new methodologies or stylistic approaches as with new concepts. Finally, the author may not be sitting in a room of her own, on her own, but writing a script or a screenplay, fully involved in a collaborative act of dramatic production or filmmaking.
We understand how the field of contemporary women's writing is shifting in composition, meaning, and focus but that is not the same as saying it is without composition, meaning and focus and, hence, this journal's interest in links, dialogues, debates between women writers. Virginia Woolf observed in A Room of One's Own that when scores of middle-class women picked up the pen to write some 200 years ago, the walls shook and shattered. The constituency of women writers is now, thankfully, much wider but the need for shaking and shattering is still as great. We look forward to the reverberations.
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