Submitted by Anne Dalke on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 4:56pm.
Intriguing thought, one that got me mulling...
& remembering the literary critic Elaine Showalter, decades ago,
differentiating between three phases of women's literature:
the "feminine" (when women writers adopted the standards of male culture),
the "feminist" (the phase of their conscious rebellion against those standards), and
the "female" (when they tried to establish their role/nature as genuine, viable, creative, independent, and different).
Then came the post-female phase, when policing that difference got tiring, seemed no longer productive....
Using those distinctions, I'd say I thought of my poem as "A 'Feminist' If" because I wrote it in conscious reaction to/as correction of a poem that seemed to me stridently masculine/male.
Hm...now what's the masculine-equivalent of "feminist"?
"Masculinist" seems to describe the affirmation, not the critique, of masculine ways of doing-and-being....
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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate
but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
in conscious rebellion
Intriguing thought, one that got me mulling...
& remembering the literary critic Elaine Showalter, decades ago,
differentiating between three phases of women's literature:
- the "feminine" (when women writers adopted the standards of male culture),
- the "feminist" (the phase of their conscious rebellion against those standards), and
- the "female" (when they tried to establish their role/nature as genuine, viable, creative, independent, and different).
Then came the post-female phase, when policing that difference got tiring, seemed no longer productive....Using those distinctions, I'd say I thought of my poem as "A 'Feminist' If" because I wrote it in conscious reaction to/as correction of a poem that seemed to me stridently masculine/male.
Hm...now what's the masculine-equivalent of "feminist"?
"Masculinist" seems to describe the affirmation, not the critique, of masculine ways of doing-and-being....