On 30/8/05 12:19 PM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Not incompatible, but different categories. Female is a gender, feminism is
> an ism. Your poem is from a female perspective. It may be useable in a
> political context, but it's not written from that perspective.
Interesting contention, but I would argue, very mistaken. To write in formal
literary ways from a female perspective can be, in certain contexts, an
extremely and consciously political act. It asserts certain things about
both literature and experience that I can't separate from the sphere of the
political, which in its broadest sense is, after all, the analysis and
practice of power. If prevailing powers dismiss or erase certain kinds of
experience as legitimate concerns of "proper" artistic expression, as part
of a wider social constellation of attitudes which marginalise or
sentimentalise such experiences, that is, to me, very much a political
question. In my experience at the time - and subsequently - such an erasure
is often the case with motherhood, which is an experience either
sentimentalised or ignored. One response - not the only response, I hasten
to say - is to couch it in terms of "proper" artistic expression. I would
argue such an assertion is profoundly feminist.
My oscillations around feminism - which is a very broad church, and covers a
wide range of practices and ideologies - have to do often with this kind of
problem: writing poems like this, instead of opening out the formalities of
writing into marginalised areas of experience, trapped me as a "female" poet
(the "AC writes poems of love and motherhood" thing, whereas I wanted to
think of myself as a poet who writes about processes of consciousness). One
can just end up back in the trap of being defined, first, by one's sex and
sexual status. Whether one should be too responsive to myopias that one's
poems are in fact arguing against is a moot point. Still, writing those
things was important for me at the time.
All the best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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