Random
To Write As a Woman Is Political
I started writing this on my personal blog but then I decided I would post it here. I got the most gorgeous letter today from someone who read my latest short story, “Strange Gods,” in the current issue of Black Warrior Review. In her letter, she talked about how important the story was to her and things so flattering I kind of choked a little. It was such a, I don’t know what it was, it was something to have a complete stranger I have never interacted with say, “your writing is important; your writing reached me.” She she thanked me for reminding her to fight the good fight. I have a point here that is not self-indulgent, I promise.
I receive the most correspondence about the stories I write about women, stories that are often intense and dark and intimate. Most of these letters come from women who thank me for telling these kinds of stories, for bringing a kind of testimony to certain women’s experiences and when I’m starting to lose faith in my writing, it is really humbling to hear that sort of thing. It reminds me that my stories may not reach everyone but they do reach some people and I think that’s what most of us want, to reach people, to make them feel, to make them bear witness.
There are a wide range of women’s experiences. A woman’s story is not just about violence or rape or the loss of an unborn or barely born child though, admittedly, those themes are the foundation of most of my writing. There are happier stories, painful stories, easier stories, different stories that are just as complex and necessary and important. As far as I’m concerned, any story that speaks to a woman’s experience is important. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I am saying. To affirm one kind of story is not to disaffirm another. Men’s stories are just as important but this not about that.
I look at what’s happening to women in this country right now and my commitment to the stories I write is reaffirmed as is my commitment to the idea that there is such a thing as women’s stories and they matter and to vocalize that is important.
Why?
Some Congressmen, elected representatives, tried to redefine rape. They tried to introduce into the lexicon of rape, the term forcible rape, as if there’s some sort of more pleasant alternative like, you know, unforcible rape. I assure you there is not. Some (mostly) men were sitting in a fancy building in their fancy suits in Washington talking about the violation of a woman’s body as if that’s something they have any business discussing and, of course, they were doing this in service of the ongoing, almost evangelical campaign to dismantle a woman’s right to an abortion. They were trying to say that some kinds of rape are worse than others, again, as if they have the right. Those Congressmen are backing down but they’ll be back. The fact that this conversation happened, in Congress, and will happen again, makes me nauseous, literally nauseous. It makes me feel like we, all of us, men and women, should be marching in protest because it is an outrage.
There is a politician in Georgia who wants to legislate women’s bodies and experiences in a different way by investigating all miscarriages to ensure that a given miscarriage was, indeed, spontaneous. He wants to not only violate a woman’s privacy, her confidential medical history, and her body, he always wants to violate what is, for many women, a very painful, personal (and private) experience. He is proposing a law that actually violates federal law. This man is obviously insane but that the thought even crossed someone’s mind is horrifying. I’ll be honest. My first reaction was, “I wish a motherfucker would.” Here’s the bill, in case you were wondering. This insanity has actually gotten that far. It has become codified which only continues to legitimize the notion that women’s bodies are the purview of legislative inquiry, that women’s bodies require a different set of rules, that when you are a woman, your body is not free to fail without interrogation.
I read about these things and work myself into a white hot rage and I start to think maybe these men think this is acceptable because there aren’t enough women’s stories out there.
I am often accused, or labeled as a centrist. I’m actually not. I don’t talk about the issues I care passionately about because they’re personal (and, I suppose, political) and because I cannot have a rational conversation about them. It seems easier to keep quiet and to talk about issues on which I can entertain other perspectives. I cannot be swayed on certain matters or be open to other points of view. I fully acknowledge this flaw in my nature. There are matters about which I’m rabid. I froth at the mouth.
When there are conversations about writing and politics, a lot of writers, myself included, have said, I’m a writer (which, when translated, often means, “I’m a lover, not a fighter”). We say, politics are not my concern. I suppose, as others have noted, politics become a concern for most of us when they encroach upon our lives in such a way that we feel compelled to take action. That’s not ideal, but we’re human and we’re selfish. We cannot fight every fight or always do the right thing or always be the citizens of the world we should be. Still, I thought about Lily Hoang’s recent post about writers and what they were or weren’t saying about Egypt. When I first read her post, I thought, “I’m just not a political writer.” I was not apathetic but I was also, as I commented, hesitant to say anything because I’m not as well versed on Egypt as I feel I needed to be to say anything worth listening to. Where certain political issues are concerned, I care, quietly. I read, watch, listen. Is that the right approach? I do not know. Perhaps action is demanded of all of us whether we feel called to the task or not.
Because I tend to write domestic stories, these claustrophobic stories about the lives of women, I have often had a bit of what I suppose is an inferiority complex, thinking maybe I wasn’t writing “important stories” befitting the imprimatur of political writing. When I think of political writing, I generally think about writing that deals with matters beyond the domestic realm—reporting on the war, for example, or writing about the current state of political uprisings in the Middle East, or human rights violations, or global poverty—these overwhelming issues that affect human lives in ways I can hardly understand most of the time because we’re insulated from certain kinds of crisis in the United States.
These global, overwhelming issues are, indeed, very serious issues that demand serious writing and attention. I do think, however, that I need to stop seeing this as a binary where either you’re writing about the personal and the body, or you’re writing about some of these larger scale issues. The more I think about it, all these stories are about how people wield power over the personal and the body and to what end. Writing about sexual violence or, as Kyle termed it this week, the literature of abortion, or of marital ennui, or the quiet desperation of motherhood or the joy of motherhood or miscarriage, these are stories that are overwhelming and affect human lives too. Perhaps it is simply a matter of scale.
As you can tell, I’m just trying to think through all this and what it means to write politically and what my responsibility as a writer is, if anything, toward writing politically. I started writing about this in my I Know Not of War post, how I generally feel I don’t know enough about some of these global issues to write on them credibly. My thinking here is an extension of that post because I actually did read the comments on that post and have thought about them a great deal. I still don’t know where my responsibility lies but this is something that remains on my mind. For now, though, I guess I would say the female body and its experiences is my war, the war I do know of and the legislative attack on the female body is where I want to start to stand my political ground as a writer. As I look at the ways in which women’s experiences and women’s bodies are being legislated right now and how legislators (often, men) are trying to decide what happens to our bodies and why, how they’re trying to take away our access to affordable gynecological care by defunding Planned Parenthood, how our right to have a legal, safe abortion has consistently been under attack for more years than I care to count, I realize it is impossible, as a woman and as a writer, to be anything BUT political. Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political act. I am trying to say these stories matter, these kinds of people matter, that these stories are as critical and consequential as the kinds of stories more traditionally considered political. I’m a relatively unknown writer. I don’t know how far my voice will ever reach. I don’t know that my words will ever sway a Congressman who thinks he has the right to legislate my body. I do know, however, that my writing reached one girl today and that feels like a good start.
Tags: congress, Women, writing as a political act
Roxane, I love everything you post. This is great.
Your words may never sway a Congressperson, but then again, I don’t know that any words can do that. You can’t cash a story. I’m more than a little cynical about politics of late.
My second-year students think I only teach five-six weeks of political poetry in a semester, but the reality is that I’m hammering them with “the personal is political” all semester long, and I hope they walk out of the class understanding that there’s no part of their lives that can’t be politicized at some point, and that either has already been or will be soon, assuming it isn’t right now. Even trying to be disengaged is a political act–it’s a ceding of your duty as a member of society. If I knew Latin I’d come up with some pithy phrase like “I breathe, therefore I am political.” Not quite as catchy in English, I’m guessing.
I think you’re absolutely right, Roxane. We don’t have enough in us for every political issue that touches us–we pick and choose. You didn’t identify with the political issues identified in the post before, but now you see how we all have something. Everyone has to fight their own political fight, the one that moves them, that shakes them up and makes them who they are. Mine is for workers (On Wisconsin!). Yours is for women. And damn I’m glad you’re fighting that fight for me. That so many women are. When I saw that bill to criminalize some miscarriages–I don’t know WTF this world has come to. But now’s a time for all of us with a pen and a brain to fight extra hard for our own fight, whether in our fiction or otherwise. If we don’t–then we lose what makes us “us” in the first place.
GREAT.
I’ll tell you, the miscarriage bill is what just pushed me right over the fucking edge. I honestly lost it when I read the article, like, I was in my office at work and I began ranting at my monitor.
I love this! Shows me the way to raising my daughters! Writing that is about women and for women is the only kind of writing I will almost always find believable. The rest is just fantasy.
I love this! Shows me the way to raising my daughters! Writing that is about women and for women is the only kind of writing I will almost always find believable. The rest is just fantasy.
Yes. So eloquently, strongly, said.
vipstores.net
i love roxane gay. because she is brilliant.
Spiro, ergo politica/us sum.
Dum spiro, politica bestia sum.
Beautiful and smart. I struggle with many of the same issues, especially around political / war writing.
The personal is political, and the political is personal. Excellent. Keep it up, Roxane.
Nothing like taking a crushing, emotionally crippling, unforgettable experience and expecting an official report to investigate/summarize it. Fuck Franklin.
Neither “personal” nor ‘passionate’ inherently contradicts or even (necessarily) differs from “rational”.
Personal, impassioned, directly informed/invested speech is not to be set, as a standard of ambition or criticism, against perfectly perspective-neutral (or -free) expression, which latter would be “rational”. “Rational”, in the context of political point of view, doesn’t mean ‘value- and interest-neutrally objective’; it means, in discourse – in human conversation – ‘discerning of ratio; able to learn’ — a kind of ‘being passionate’, in the sense of ‘being able to be affected’.
Of course, passion admits of misdirection, and perspective entails limitation. But there’s nothing about impassioned political speech that’s necessarily contrary to data, to perspective that hews more rather than less closely to whatever in a context is disinterested and independent of point of view.
Forcible rape is an example of a politically motivated redundancy that implies something – ‘less forced rape’ – the irrationality of which can surely be argued rationally and passionately.
brava! Let me say that before the inevitable backlash.
This: “Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political act.”
and this:
“I do know, however, that my writing reached one girl today and that feels like a good start.”
I find it strange when people act as if the only way to be political as a writer is to write stories about what is going on in Egypt or some thing like that. Everything I write is political whether I try or not. My parents lived in a world in which their humanity was questioned. My father is still visibly pained and angered by the racism he faced playing soccer against the University of Maryland in the 1960s. Those stories inform my writing, even if that anecdote never becomes a story.
I owe my very existence to racism, to be extremely reductive and flip. I live in a world where, in my opinion, the fact that I’m black is the least interesting thing about me. But that is not the widespread opinion of strangers who quickly evaluate me because of this fact.
I never have and never will write a story that’s designed to force legislation on a particular issue. That’s stupid and ineffective. And I never have and never will write about a hot world issue I have an interest in, but no deep understanding of. I will continue to probe what it means to be human. I don’t expect that if I write about a rape victim that my story will end rape. Wish that could happen, but my hope is that by probing the human spirit, I will help an individual see the complexities of the human spirit and that is political.
or as Tupac said: “I’m not saying that I will change the world. but I guarantee you I will spark the brain that will change the world.”
I write to spark brains. I write the words. Do with it what you will. If anything.
brava! Let me say that before the inevitable backlash.
This: “Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political act.”
and this:
“I do know, however, that my writing reached one girl today and that feels like a good start.”
I find it strange when people act as if the only way to be political as a writer is to write stories about what is going on in Egypt or some thing like that. Everything I write is political whether I try or not. My parents lived in a world in which their humanity was questioned. My father is still visibly pained and angered by the racism he faced playing soccer against the University of Maryland in the 1960s. Those stories inform my writing, even if that anecdote never becomes a story.
I owe my very existence to racism, to be extremely reductive and flip. I live in a world where, in my opinion, the fact that I’m black is the least interesting thing about me. But that is not the widespread opinion of strangers who quickly evaluate me because of this fact.
I never have and never will write a story that’s designed to force legislation on a particular issue. That’s stupid and ineffective. And I never have and never will write about a hot world issue I have an interest in, but no deep understanding of. I will continue to probe what it means to be human. I don’t expect that if I write about a rape victim that my story will end rape. Wish that could happen, but my hope is that by probing the human spirit, I will help an individual see the complexities of the human spirit and that is political.
or as Tupac said: “I’m not saying that I will change the world. but I guarantee you I will spark the brain that will change the world.”
I write to spark brains. I write the words. Do with it what you will. If anything.
I miss driving to Baraga with you on Friday nights and shouting obscenities. No one to talk about Egypt, breast feeding, Wisconsin, and Rush Limbaugh with. When are you coming back?!?
Yeah, I had to read that article about 14 times before I could believe my own eyes. I was too shocked to even rant.
I can’t find it for the life of me, but I remember a piece in the NY Times years ago about how in one Latin American country, the law requires a woman submit to a pelvic exam from a state doctor after a miscarriage so he (of course) can determine if she’s had an abortion or not. I want to say it was Ecuador, but I don’t know for certain.
I love this, dude. Nice Tupac quote. That’s what I like to think, too: I wrote spark brains.
All legislation is, either immediately or eventually, of the “body”.
To me, this irresistibility of corporal effect is why the legislative disciplining of bodies should be enacted – and overturned – in the light of the relative autonomy of corporal subjects: the categorical imperative embedded in social laws is that ‘the principle of this law is in accordance with the corporal interest(s) of even those who disobey it’.
A law against assault, theft, or fraud ought not to set one against one’s own body; a law that accounts for ‘unforcible rape’ does.
I think we need to think about “political” in a different way. I doubt Blake Butler would define himself as a political writer (maybe he would, can’t speak for the dude), but Scorch Atlas is inspired by language, obviously, but it also speaks to the environmental collapse we see all around us. Maybe he had no thoughts of that while writing it (and I’m sure he was thinking about writing a good story, rather than writing a “politically correct” one), but that’s partly what I see in it. The same with Ryan Call’s writing. Not that there isn’t anything else there. Not that we can’t engage with the language and forget anything else there. We can if we want. And not that it’s written in the wake of the failure of congress to act in the face of our environmental blah blah….but we are political beings so whatever the reader has in his or her heart will show up when he or she is making meaning out of a text.
Sadly, it’s a little late for coherent, essayish posting, so I only want to list a few points with the hope that you intelligent folks will be able to fill in the rationale around/behind them.
– In pedagogical theory, affirming one thing is indeed unaffirming another (see: null curriculum). That said, explicitly noting that there’s no intention to unaffirm the other may counter that initial deaffirmation. Or maybe it doesn’t. An honest question.
– When we talk about bodies, why do we never talk about the body of the unborn? Slightly less honest question, insofar as what I’m really getting at is that there’s not a lot of science proving or disproving the humanity of a [whatever term you want to use for that which is within a womb]. And if it’s to be considered a form of imperialism for men on Capitol Hill to say a woman can’t get an abortion, how is it any less imperialist to say a woman can kill that which is within a womb? That’s an honest question.
– All rape is terrible. All murder is terrible. There are well-accepted degrees of the latter, and a differentiation between murder and manslaughter.
– I have no idea how to make writing — meaning literary writing, not theoretical writing — relate to these issues.
Brilliant. Love, love, love this.
I am often accused, or labeled as a centrist. I’m actually not. I don’t talk about the issues I care passionately about because they’re personal (and, I suppose, political) and because I cannot have a rational conversation about them.
Honestly, I feel like there are certain issues that don’t deserve a “rational conversation.” A spade is a spade and a misogynist attack is a misogynist attack. This is a fucking all-out assault on who we are. We are literally being treated worse than horses. Literally. There is no other way to take this than personal.
[…] of talking, I wrote about being a woman and a writer and starting to find out what I am political about because I lost my shit completely over some abhorrent legislation being considered in Georgia […]
Lots of wrath at the Facebook page bearing his name:
https://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=175810&id=67713033609&comments
In related news, is a recall of a state representative possible or unprecedented?
Beautiful, eloquent, and necessary.
<3
I do know how far your words will reach, R. I can see the future. They will reach far.
Great comment, Brian. I have been struggling all week with the frustration that all of these dialougues people volley… they aren’t actually changing anyone’s mind. On FB yesterday there was a name-calling back and forth around abortion, but I thought: what the hell is the point? None of this accomplishes anything. Will a single person DO anything?
I confess I used to be FAR more politically active … and then I became a mom of a daughter and my day to day outrage about the world I have to raise her in just started getting the better of me. It is poison to the spirit, even though the poison is real in this world. Trying to find that balance of engagement vs. not being sick to my stomach every minute of every day.
It is so disheartening to realize that I am still having the same conversations and fighting the same battles over the same issues that I was over 20 years ago when I was a scrappy little feminist in college. Nothing has changed.
So, yes “I breathe therefore I am political” … but also “I am female therefore I am exhausted, terrified, enraged, and wish I could just get through 24 hours without the male dominated world making decisions about the aesthic and/or political value (and fate) of my body.”
Rion, funny that you mention being labeled “because” you are black: I have a friend whose parents are from Barbados, he gets annoyed by the African American moniker, and if he’s in a fighting mood, he’ll turn on someone with, “You know, not EVERYONE is of African descent! In fact, my parents are actually NATIVE AMERICANS, you asshole!”
Whoopie Goldberg once said during one of her concerts, “I am an American. I am not from Africa, I was not born there, I may never visit there in my life. As for the other word – I am not, and I don’t personally know anyone who is.”
But what do I know? I’m just a woman. Being political in my commentary. ;)
Roxane? That’s all I ever do.
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Good stuff, Roxane. I like your words.
“Those Congressmen are backing down but they’ll be back.”
Their generation, mindset is dying of old age, cancer and heart disease. When our generation has full control — pistol-grip-grasp — we will celebrate the death of generational bigotry and piss on its headstone.
I do not believe that rampant ignorance, intolerance can survive — history shows it as receding.
Says nate-stradamus.
I have a problem with “African American” also. My parents are from Trinidad (and their grandparents from Barbados). I’ve always felt it doesn’t give me a connection to most of my family. Which is why I mostly say black. People often sound dumb and overly cautious when saying African-American. But sometimes it is more accurate if you are talking about people of African descent who are American citizens, which technically since the mid 90s my parents have been.
Truthfully, typing this, I realize I don’t care that much anymore. I wonder if that’s progress.
We live in history–therefore our experience of the world, which we reflect in stories, is necessarily political. Albeit a writer’s work speaks of the politics she as an individual is closest to, just as religion, socioeconomic background, and intellectual passions will also strongly flavor a writer’s work. This is what you’re doing, Roxane! There’s a difference between writing pamphlets and writing fiction. In pamphlets, politics is the writer’s primary concern. But the prerogative of fiction is to construct and inhabit its own strange and individual world; I think if your writing tried to hard to pay debts to some issue or another, it would be labored and false. Lastly, I’m sure you’ve read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” but if you’re up for a reread, it seems like she’d fit into your thought trajectory right now. Of course, she’s fighting an earlier version of your battle, but that doesn’t mean her ideas are outdated. :)
http://trickwithaknife.com/?p=1563
I wanted to show you this from the Rachel Maddow Show. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#41483437 I live in Wyoming, which has a huge Republican/Conservative majority. (I’m a liberal democrat.) Some in the Legislature have been trying to push anti-abortion legislation, and some have been fighting against it. An amazing story, and as Rachel says it’s a story that isn’t going to turn out the way you think it is. The courage of a legislator to stand up on the floor of the Wyoming House and tell her personal story of abortion!!
~ Tamara
Thanks for the link, Tamara. I heard about that legislator and thought she had big brass ovaries.
I think your second point is especially interesting and thought-provoking. It seems to me that the body of the unborn is talked about a lot and is the location of many if not most of the pro-life arguments I’ve heard. But: imperialism implies hegemony over an already existent population and a kind of forced political unification. A fetus, in utero, could not exist outside the womb by itself (at least not at the point where abortion is still legal in most states). It is not a population dominated by an imperialist power. It’s biologically dependent upon its host. I also read, years ago, a really interesting article about the chimeric aspect of a pregnancy–the mother and fetus share cells across some cellular barrier. The fetus, then is not a complete creature, unto itself, but literally, on a cellular level, part of the mother. So I don’t know that it’s accurate to say that a woman “can kill that which is within a womb” because the two aren’t separate autonomous entities. For these reasons, I also don’t know that imperialism applies here either. But I also think it’s shortsighted to rely solely on science to discuss the morality of abortion, since what happens after a child is born is the true crux of the issue for many women. To begin and end with the scientific definition of the humanity (however one is defining that) of a fetus has been–unfortunately, in the contemporary abortion conversation–often to ignore or devalue the humanity of the person who is pregnant, as if the two aren’t interconnected, as if the humanity of the fetus has nothing to do with that of the mother and as if it is not a biologically lesser (read: chimeric, undeveloped and dependent) being.
Bravo, Roxane. It takes as much courage to write about the personal and domestic as it does to write about big political issues. Your voice matters.
I totally agree, the thing about redefining the word rape happened here in my hometown of
Lincoln Ne.
I really appreciate this article and keep up the good work
Nancy Wissink
Also, every story in the book (Scorch Atlas) has a disintegrating nuclear hetero family unit.
That can be read a lot of different ways, but given that Blake has attributed the environmental chaos on that book to fundamental entropic forces more than any kind of political statement abt climate change, I kinda have always found myself thinking about it as the rot at the core of we value in terms of family and normalcy. Which is another way of reading that text this is ultimately political
Those are good points. (And it’s terrible that, again, I can only get here late and tired.)
Talking about interconnectivity and viability treads on dangerous ground (to my moral eye). We soon start talking about the greatly aged, the comatose, the mentally disabled. I’d defend all of those. Is physical dependence so different from practical dependence? I wonder.
But these comparisons aren’t really the issue. Those are separate issues, literally; they are not in the same arena. Developing humans are completely unique, and they need a completely unique understanding. Something that is incomplete but deeply possible deserves, I think, all the more protection. This gets into the morals of potential, and that is a philosophy beyond my current wisdom.
I’m not sure I’m entirely buying the sharing cells idea (I’m guessing blood cells, mostly). That sounds meaningful, but it also elides the fact that the mother’s and child’s DNA are completely different.
Thanks Roxane.
We 6 chickz have been discussing this a lot recently. And, it’s good to hear that our role models are doing the same.
“Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political act. I am trying to say these stories matter, these kinds of people matter, that these stories are as critical and consequential as the kinds of stories more traditionally considered political. ”
Brava, Roxane! for writing your rage and frustration and telling the truth.
Maybe by “forcible rape”, they are trying to leave open a category called “rape in war”; that it is ok when part of public violence, a type of weapon. All of the current backlash attempts to control women’s bodies are horrifying. Without Planned Parenthood, I would have lost my mind and my health long ago. The stories we need are the stories that connect us to our common ground: the human stories of identity and love and loss and celebration, of survival from heartbreak no matter what form it takes (first love to being stoned to death for adultery), and the terrors and joy of ordinary life, as well as the crisis and violence. Because it is in the simplest type of awareness that the personal connects us to the global.
Roxane, let’s start a new country.
That’s the crux of “women’s issues” they inevitably occur then private matters butt up against public discourse. Why women miscarry is still a mystery to medical science. There are untold factors that could influence whether the baby is carried to term or not. To find out more, read this: http://morningquickie.com/2011/02/25/miscarriage-is-not-your-fault-and-not-a-crime/
Yes, these things matter very much. Like you I have a visceral reaction. I was eating at my computer when I started reading this, but I put the plate aside. Who decides that domestic fiction is “just” something, a just that implies it is less important than writing about something else? We all live in domestic situations somewhere. It is the universal human experience and one that takes up much of our heart and mind and aspirations. It is what I like most to read, it’s what I write, it’s what much of the early novels were about. I’d suggest that it’s demeaned as a women’s story and a women’s livelihood in the way that other occupations associated with women became. (The YWCA had competitions in the last fin de siecle to prove that women were capable of using heavy equipment–the typewriter. Secretary, until then, was a male occupation.) But we don’t have to buy into that anymore than redefining rape or miscarriage.
“I’m/We’re/He’s/She’s/They’re only human” has been an excuse for like every single terrible, despicable act or acquiescence thereof in history, I think. It’s like Biblically retarded.
Nurture over nature.
[…] –To Write As a Woman Is Political — Roxane Gay @ HTML Giant […]
[…] was an incident on Wednesday. I went home angry. I couldn’t sleep, so I read things, including this HTMLGIANT post by Roxane […]
I like it. Write as a woman is to Live…
Another trend I find very disturbing is the tendency of an increasing number of men who write off any book or movie that deals with women’s issues, no matter how serious, as “chick lit” or a “chick flick” and refuse to see or read it. In effect they are further marginalizing these stories and making it easier, through their lack of awareness, for *&%*% politicians like Chris Smith to propose such despicable legislation.
[…] To write as a woman is political, by Roxane Gay. […]
Thank you for this Roxane. I like when you get rabid. That Georgia bill is just beyond unbelievable. I yelled at my computer screen too. Another proposed in SD recently would make it “justifiable homicide” to kill if it was intended to prevent harm to a fetus. What the.
[…] excellent things with the unreliable narrator. Then again, as Roxanne Gay eloquently pointed out, to write as a woman is political. There is also the issue of Revolutionary Road, which I feel works but at the same time […]
[…] say that because I just read this post by Roxane Gay at HTMLGIANT about writing as a woman, and how that’s political. It treads […]
Precious the Pic. But, Women, it is the meaning:
Don’t want Sheep’s Pric, so take butcher’s blade.
NO MORE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
[…] times I get the sense that writers like to avoid being political. Earlier this year, I wrote an essay where I said that the very act of writing as a woman is a political act and I believe that. Until […]
[…] Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political act. I am trying to say these stories matter, these kinds of people matter, that these stories are as critical and consequential as the kinds of stories more traditionally considered political. I’m a relatively unknown writer. I don’t know how far my voice will ever reach. I don’t know that my words will ever sway a Congressman who thinks he has the right to legislate my body. I do know, however, that my writing reached one girl today and that feels like a good start. Roxane Gay […]
Writing as a woman is more accepted as reasonable than it was. People making that choice and allowing it has made it less radical, but it still takes self-confidence to speak out in a male dominated field. It’s indeed a political act to write at all as a woman, authentically, from the heart.
For some people that includes writing about women’s issues, or even so specific as raising children, though that’s a men’s issue as well. A lot more men are involved raising their daughters than I ever imagined would happen, which makes me happy.
For other people, it can be pushing beyond boundaries of what is women’s, going beyond gender identification. A woman writing about physics or astronomy in Sci Fi or philosophical concepts or anything is still bold.
For any of us to be writing stories not necessarily for the dominant paradigm of commerce, but primarily in the hope that they will mean something to someone, such as Roxane experienced, is, political, and goes even deeper than that, I think. There’s something beautiful about it that allows the reader to open up, for a loving connection between people being vulnerable, perpetuating creative flow. And that is something women as a whole have often been considered skilled at.
As women who are engaged with the gyn threats naturally pull back viscerally, they then have to work harder to get past that muscular and behavioral contraction reaction in order to expand again into communication through writing stories. That’s one of the places extra boldness is required. And that’s part of what I felt in this article.
[…] warning when she discusses the reality and discourse of sexual violence: “I once wrote an essay about how, as a writer who is also a woman, I increasingly feel that writing is a political act […]
[…] author Roxane Gay once said that “Anytime I write a story about a women’s experience I am committing a political […]
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