>Whatever, I'm interested to hear from the female writers (regardless of
>orientation, which seems to me secondary and probably only of biographical
>interest) on this list such that I can develop a sharper understanding of
>how that place which is the locus of writing might differ between men and
>women: does it differ and, if so, is this because of or irrespective of
>desire?

David, you might find this interesting; it's a talk I gave recently for a panel called "Women's Dreams on Stage".  I can't pretend it's especially profound, but it might be a beginning of discussion...it's also quite long.  And if bits are cut out by my fascist emailer, I apologise in advance!

Best

Alison

Thinking about this topic, I wondered, what is a woman¹s dream?  What is a woman¹s consciousness?  Is there any such thing?  And it is astonishing how quickly such speculation leads you back to the body; to thoughts of sex, desire, birth, to what defines us biologically as female in opposition to the male.  And how depressing that can be, since in a moment¹s unwariness the simply physical so easily slides into the kind of biological determinism which seems to be becoming more and more dominant in current conservative thinking.  The body, which promises liberation, is also the site of enslavement.  And then I think further to musings about relationship: between body and body, body and mind, between the mind and the world, men and women, adults and children, memory and the present.  I am led to endless branchings off, endless complexities, endless ambiguities and contradictions, enfoldings of male and female which re-emerge in endlessly surprising manifestations.  A dream is already indefinable; to try to define what a woman¹s dream might be is surely beyond possibility.  One may speak of ³this woman¹s dream² or ³that woman¹s dream², but not at all, I think, of any dreaming that is inherently female.  How often do we wonder what a ³man¹s dream² is?  Dreams are beyond gender: they are where sex becomes fluid, ambiguous, subversive, full of the terrors which are the other faces of desire.  For dreams also encompass nightmares.

And I wonder how to talk about such things in any way which might not be misleading, because I can¹t go much beyond a series of generalisations, a pointing out of problematics which surround the whole question of a ³woman¹s consciousness², especially when it enters the ambiguous arenas of art and human imagination.

For while the overwhelming temptation might be to say: we are, in our imaginations, in the worlds we make with language, simply human, and not so easily defined as female or male, it is not so easy to ignore the inhibitions and oppressions which make this an idea which perhaps assumes too much.   I have always been deeply feminist, in that my whole life and all my work has been a struggle to assume for myself the same rights to speak, to say, to express and to be, which it seems that men have always had.  I say, ³it seems², because in fact I think that men are as trammelled by stereotypical masculinities as women are by feminities, and may perhaps be more insidiously trapped, since the stereotypes turn so often to their apparent advantage.  Beyond claims of victimhood on both sides, the dilemmas of existence which face both men and women are essentially the same, if often complementary; and the creation of masculinity and femininity are deeply implicated in each other.

But to be crude, which is sometimes important, the injustices which are historically applicable to women are as intractable as ever - I saw in the city the other day a stark fact on the stickers for International Women¹s Day: women do two thirds of the world¹s work, and are paid one tenth of the world¹s income.  The struggle for women to merely assume their place in the world as equals to men is ongoing and constantly subject to terrible reversals.  This is indisputable.  And with these real economic and social repressions go repressions of the imagination, censorships of expression, which bear on the representation of the female in art by both men and women.  I don¹t think any writer of either sex can afford to ignore these issues.  But dealing with them leads to constant difficulties, none of which are easily soluble.

I consider myself primarily a poet who forays now and then into theatre, a medium I find endlessly fascinating and frustrating.   The two areas of literature which have been especially resistant to women are drama and poetry.  Why this is so is a very fraught and complex question, because it has as much to do with inner inhibitions as social and economic pressures.  George Steiner, in one of his less brilliant moments, suggested that the reason there is no woman Shakespeare is nothing to do with social imperatives, but because art is essentially agonistic, and women have babies which fulfil their creative desires.  Well, that thesis certainly doesn¹t fit with my personal experience, but it¹s still a truism which crops up again and again in all sorts of guises, mostly much cruder than Steiner¹s.  What I find especially horrible about this idea is how it instantly erases a huge area of human experience from art, even if it is actually present there.  Camille Paglia, for example, asks how many great works of art have been about childbirth, as if there aren¹t any.  There are in fact very many, from say Wordsworth¹s Intimations of Immortality to Muriel Rukeyser¹s Nine Poems for the Unborn Child: but in Paglia's statement their existence is instantly elided.  These assumptions distort the actuality of both art and human experience; and by so doing, they distort the possibilities of the future.

For an artist, a danger of countering these distorting assumptions by asserting the female is that one might become trapped in the Feminine, and become purely reactionary, following an agenda of opposition rather than one¹s own.  And one might inadvertantly be limited by its perceived possibilities, and simply find oneself in another trap, which is all the old ideas of the female dressed up in new clothes.  It¹s that old dilemma of the body again, how it is at once freeing and unfreeing.  Too often those who trumpet the Female Voice as a liberating force are sniffing nostalgically at the very idea of the feminine which has been shaped for centuries to the advantage of men: the voice which speaks quiet and low, the pretty, the helpmeet, the passive, the solely phsyical world.  And yet in these desires towards the feminine is a recognition that there is something still which is undervalued or censored, a sense of an imbalance in cultural perceptions of the female, which somehow has to be addressed if we are to see our worlds clearly.

These dilemmas have always been present in my own work, as much nodes of anguish as of celebration.  I don¹t see the task of writing as the job of elucidating a polemic on social or personal issues, and I have always been wary of ideologies, inescapable though they are: writing for me is almost synonymous with freedom, and holds all the dilemmas that the idea of freedom holds.  And it seems to me that my writing progresses in a series of oscillations between contradictory impulses; my hope is that these oscillations produce their own energies and, perhaps, in their elisions, might illuminate some kind of truth.  I certainly do not expect my writing to find any answers, but I hope that now and again it poses a few questions.

I am primarily a poet, and in my poetry have pondered again and again the dilemmas of wrenching to my own usages a language which has been mainly constructed by men, wondering all the time how deeply implicit these power relations might be in the language itself.  Perhaps, a hope which is ultimately to me very important, I might find freedoms in these other kinds of questionings, which I might use for my own questions.  My poems are deeply concerned with perception and language and the construction or destruction of a subject, and turn very often on the relationship with the Other - whether the Other inside, or the world itself, or a child, or a lover. Poems are not masks, not fictions, but rather are attempts to grapple with reality, attempts to express being in language.  Which does not mean, of course, that they are literally factual; I have always felt very resistant to biographical readings of my work.  To write something down, to make a piece of art, is already a movement away from the thing itself; no piece of art is me.

Theatre, on the other hand, offers at least the illusion of a mask, and sometimes this itself can be freeing.  I can¹t say that the representation of the female has been an overriding concern for me in my work in the theatre, but considerations of gender are without exception deeply embedded within it. In writing for theatre I can release my dreams and nightmares, my fears and desires, and make them into something else, representations with their own lives and inner workings.  About half of my work for the stage has been overtly an examination of masculinity, and often violent masculinity, though this in turn might itself be an expression of a violent femininity more often released in my poetry.  I see around me a world shaped and in many ways defined by male violence, and theatre is a place where I can examine what that might be, how it works, what drives it; perhaps to see also what male and female have in common, because we have much more in common with each other than with, say, a spider.  We are all human, although I don¹t see this statement as any easy gloss over our differences.  Unfortunately the ironies and questions implicit in what I have written have not always been translated to the production on stage: this might well be, in part, because they have been directed by men, who have simply not picked up on them; or perhaps there is a subconscious desire to repress those very fears and desires I wish to express.

Alison Croggon