Carol Shields in “A View from the Edge of the Edge.” Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary:

Women writers often seem willing to engage with vulnerability, including themselves in that vulnerability. As a woman who has elected a writing life, I am interested in writing away that invisibility of women’s lives, looking at writing as an act of redemption. In order to do this, I need the companionship, the example, of other women who are writing.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis in The Pink Guitar:

The feminine is where I am colonized. The feminine is the dream of an elsewhere, a someplace uncolonized. The feminine is orange/blush/pink/peach/vibrant red “in” this year. The feminine is a short blue one, or a long plaid one, but never a short plaid one or a long blue one. It is that kind of knowledge. (165)

In honor of International Women’s Day, here’s a few clips from Alix Olson:

The sexist attitudes toward Hillary Clinton have become glaring. Lemon Hound posted a link to an interesting article that discusses this issue. Even though I chose to caucus for Obama, I’m very aware of this awkward space Hillary has had to inhabit and I don’t like it one bit.

I don’t care how you self-identify — woman, man, feminist, anti-whatever — the blatant sexism in this primary campaign should make you pause.

I’m reading Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics right now. His analysis of the dominant publics sphere as inherently embedded in 19th-Century values seems on target to me. He argues that the the binary between public and private are:

the very scene of selfhood and scarcely distinguishable from the experience of gender and sexuality. That makes them hard to challenge. In the case of gender, public and private are not just formal rules about how men and women should behave. They are bound up with meanings of masculinity and femininity. Masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space; femininity, in a language of private feeling.

This explains, largely, to me, why sexism has been able to prevail in this primary presidential campaign. I know I often feel the effects of being in the double bind when I choose to speak my mind, in either public or private arenas, because, as Warner points out, speech acts have specific contexts and spaces in which they are considered appropriate. Public space for women’s speech, it seems to me, is still very much under construction.

Gloria Steinem wrote an interesting article for the NYTimes a few days ago. Her article “Women Are Never Front-Runners” offers some insight into the gender politics being played out in the ongoing Presidential election.

I, clearly, will vote for either Clinton or Obama when it comes time for the presidential election. And, I’m excited to have two really great candidates to choose from inside the Democratic party, but like Steinem I’m puzzled as to why many question Clinton’s authority as a leader, a woman, and potentially the next American President. Steinem admits: “To clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two terms of President Obama.” So why this strong divide between these two candidates? My hope is that they will run together as President and Vice President, but since they have both been at each other’s throats on the campaign trail it sadly seems unlikely.

If you have time, do take a moment to read Steinem’s article. I found it valuable. If nothing else, it confirms my thoughts about how gender is affecting Clinton’s political success. Issues of authorship and authority seem to be alive an well in this campaign. The media keeps saying that Clinton lacks “likeability,” that she seems non-human, robotic even, and she’s constantly being judged by her husband’s previous actions in the white house. Proof, once again, that women in our society are not defined as individuals in their own right. They are always interpreted in relation to the lives with which they are joined, the lives they create, and those they influence. I don’t mind this method of defining the self (actually I’m favor of breaking down individualism and its stronghold on the American political identity) as much as I do the fact that men often are not held to the same standard.

The truth is: I know little about either Clinton or Obama. I only know about what little I read, hear, and watch on tv. And, let’s be honest — who can trust these mediums? All of the candidates are trained to present a certain image of themselves, to sell certain ideologies. Politicians are becoming more and more like bathroom products — toiletries that are practical, smell nice, and sooth one’s worried mind. Regardless, I would just like for us all to be aware of the gender expectations and ideologies that influence our thinking. This election is important. Change is desperately needed. But, in addition to choosing the best candidate to bring it about, the real question is — can we bring about the change needed for ourselves? Can we redefine authority so that it includes women? So that it includes women’s right to choose to procreate or not? Can American society decide which gender they’d like Clinton to perform for them? (i.e. Clinton’s so-called female crying episode, the feminine suits she wears, her slicked back hairstyle which is suggestive of some interpretation of a male aesthetic, or her assertive “male” demeanor interpreted as “unlikeable” or “bitchy” — all of these indicate the ways that Clinton’s performing gender and attempting to strike a balance between portraying an accepted masculinist interpretation of authority while not denying her feminine characteristics.) Nothing is more clear than the fact that we need to redefine what authority means.

Many of the points Steinem brings up are problems that I’ve been witnessing while watching and reading the news, which makes it abundantly clear that for any progress to be made — we need to collectively reconsider the expectations we have for both women and men. I, of course, address this issue in nearly ever class that I teach. The problem is — how to instigate a radical change in our society’s understanding and treatment of gender on a much wider scale than my classrooms of 22 students. If you find the answer let me know. Every time I step outside of my academic bubble to go spend some time with family I am accused of being too “opinionated” (because my mother would never use the word bitchy) and for speaking out too much or at all. What I’m really confronted with, however, is the fact that I don’t fit my family’s model of what a woman should be. My thoughts and convictions are always interpreted as “critical;” my devotion to my work and my desire for solitude then are interpreted as cold or distant. These accusations against myself are manifesting themselves in different but similar enough ways for Hillary Clinton. The question for me right now is not who will you vote for, but rather — what expectations are influencing your vote? Are the tactics that sway your political opinions similar to those that persuaded you to buy that bar of melon scented organic face soap? If we really want change, we must realize that it starts with ourselves.

Blogging Woolf and the Virginia Woolf listserv that I subscribe to drew my attention to this odd image of Virginia playing hockey. It’s on the cover of a conservative magazine called The Standard Weekly. Sort of random, no?

Oh, snap! This video is back on youtube! I wrote briefly about this short film once before at my eeink site. I won’t offer an analysis of it now, but it is significant to know that the film was commissioned by Kotex in the 1940s to help, or save, mothers and male doctors from talking about the female body and its processes with young adolescent girls. Joan Jacobs Brumberg discusses this phenomenon in her book, The Body Project. Just wanted folks to know that it’s available once again. It’s about 10 minutes long, well worth it too, but know that it’s longer than you might expect a clip to be.

A running list of feminist scholars and theorists that write about women and authorship. Feel free to comment and help me make this list more comprehensive!

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar — on anxiety and many other aspects of female authorship, like naming and female creativity
Carolyn Heilbrun — on autobiography
Susan Stanford Friedman, on autobiography, HD, and the long poem
Sidonie Smith — autobiography
Shari Benstock–autobiography
Liz Stanley — autobiography
Jennifer Summitt — medieval women from the Middle Ages
Karma Lochrie — Margery Kempe, writing of the body, and the “female mystic”
Cixous — God/Priestess writing scheme, authorship anxiety
Irigaray — intersections between authorship and sexuality, women’s genelogies
Minh-ha — God/Priestess writing scheme
Alice Walker — African-American women and authorship
Jane Tompkins — academic writing and autobiography
Nancy Miller — autobiography
Holly Laird — collaboration and co-authorship
Ann Vickery — whose work I haven’t had time to really delve into yet, but that explores issues of gender and authorship in work by female LangPoets

I know I’m leaving out a bunch of Rhet Comp scholars, mainly because I haven’t found them useful yet for my theoretical purposes. And, I know this list mainly focuses on autobiography and authorship of the self, a dominant theme in second wave feminist theory. That’s it for now.