How To

A question on my mind is how to live as a feminist, a writer, and a scholar. Where do I stand as a feminist, a writer, and a scholar? To put it another way, how do I write as a feminist scholar?

            Last fall, I took the Gender and Sexuality Program core course, and there were weekly reading responses for that as well. For one, I tried to do something with the (girl’s) life of the imagination portrayed in Fun Home, the (girl’s) life of the imagination portrayed in Persepolis, and my own (g?rl’s*) life of the imagination. It was an attempt at writing my self, albeit an unsuccessful one. I got a check minus for that, and I’m not sure if it’s because I was writing my self or because I didn’t do a good job. Or a combination. I got a check plus plus for a five page close analysis of Trumpet (I think we only needed 1-2 pages), in which I found out something very significant to understanding the book, and something which required a close, careful reading. There was nothing of my self in that piece of writing. I still think back on that piece with pleasure, because I did well and because I was acknowledged for it.

            What would Cixous say about all that? Is traditional/patriarchal scholarly writing bad writing?

            For me, academic writing is play. “The most glorious kind of play,” as a character in The Secret History by Donna Tartt said regarding the study of the classical world. But he was the character who hid from the problems of reality: all his care and compassion went to the play of the mind. Perhaps feminism makes (scholarly) writing more than just play? (Which is not to say that other -isms do not have the same effect.) And perhaps this is why I want to go into the new field of Culture and Media Studies – classics is the study of the culture and media of the Greeks and the Romans, but I am too much a feminist to be satisfied with studying what is in the past, reinterpretable but not changeable. To write as a feminist scholar is to write for change in how people live.

            I found both Cixous and Spivak opaque, but Spivak’s opacity carried authority. I simply didn’t understand Spivak, because she was so scholarly. I didn’t understand, and I blamed my own lack of scholarly knowledge and experience. I didn’t understand Cixous, and … I wanted to blame her for incoherently ranting, for being emotional instead of analytical, for not (as I first thought) taking any text but instead speaking in generalities.

            But I took bel hooks’ advice, and my own advice, and when I started writing notes for my response I put the silt on part of the page and the water on another, and I started to grasp her overall point, if not the particulars. “The Laugh of the Medusa” is a demand for change, and that is something I understand.

            And, in class I saw what kind of change Cixous wants: people, especially female people, should put private masturbatory writing in public places, and end to shame for thought and body (though I don’t fully grasp how in Cixous’s perspective thought and body are … simultaneous). And I realized that she took herself as text.

            I am still no longer comfortable with the traditional academic writing style. Damnit, I’m good at it! And I don’t have to put a little piece of my self on display. I just need to play for long enough. There’s no criteria for writing the self, except how much of your self you write or perhaps how well you write it (with an utterly undefined and indefinable value for ‘well’).

            I think that the kind of writing style I use should depend on what I am writing. If I am my own text, that’s one kind of writing. If I have chosen something else as my text, that is another. And the two can be blended. Perhaps the two ought to be blended sometimes, a hermaphrodite, to gender writing like Cixous.

            I still don’t have a working definition for ‘feminism’.

            I didn’t write my self at all. I blame the deadline and the assigned length. And, at the beginning, I shouldn't have put it another way (How do I write as a feminist scholar?). That narrowed the question too much. Should have been, How do I live as writer, etc. Or, better yet: Writer Feminist Scholar HOW?

            I don't want to put my self here. Not right now. Maybe later.