Specifically, I Am Not Sorry I Have A Vagina at HTMLGIANT.
Highlight from the comments: “reading this comment through the lens of masculinity, you and i seem but two apes in an htmlcongo, sparring to see who is alpha.”
Insightful highlight from the comments: “please don’t fuck my poems, leidz.”
Insightful highlight from the comments, this time I’m serious: “Stuff like this gives me headaches. I don’t know anyone personally who uses this kind of language. Maybe it’s why I don’t hang out with many writer-types. A lot of artists, though. And the ladies never define themselves as women as it is quite obvious that they are female. At least biologically. I would never call Barnes or Sexton or Maslowska or Reza (the latter being two of my favorite contemporary writers) ‘women writers’ because it’s just as ridiculous as calling myself a ‘Chicano writer.’”
[The topic of discussion is "Writers, Plain and Simple" by Claire Messud over at Guernica, which you should also read. Look at me, telling you what you should do like I know. But there it is. Go.]
Tags: Comment Spectating · Guernica · Sex · Women2 Comments
So many comments! (And the comments section reads like a lovely conversation between dedicated readers, which is nice.) Sadly, I haven’t the time to read them all to see if my own thoughts are already in there somewhere. So, I will put them here, where they may spark our own conversation.
It seems to me that the wrong response to the label “woman writer” is to deny that gender or sex has anything to do with how one writes. Certainly our experience influences our writing and certainly our sex or gender influences our experience. It is the same with race, religion, age, nearly every aspect of our life influences what we have to say on all subjects. Yes, categorizing and labeling is limiting, but it is also a convenient way to order the world, and in many cases is more useful than harmful. If “woman writer” is a bad term, then it is not important to know the author’s experience at all, since any discussion of that experience will limit our interpretation of his or her work.
Better, I think, is to embrace “woman writer” AS WELL AS “man writer” (or whatever versions of those texts you like). Or take it further and discuss a writer as a “male, heterosexual, black, city-dwelling, immigrant, english-speaking writer” if he is such. The idea is not to eliminate these labels, but to make sure we understand that a single aspect is not the most important one. Because there is no most important one. These aspects are important, yes, but there can be no legitimate hierarchy, at least not one that is helpful to the consideration of a writer’s work.
I’ve gotten in the bad habit of just saying “writer,” and forgoing adjectives beyond “good” or “bad.” Even that has friends asking WHAT RIGHT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY WHAT’S GOOD, etc. At an open mic where gigolos read, are they hooker authors? Trick authors?