well, that certainly didn’t go over well, did it
actually I was talking not about “rigour” or whatever, but about the pressure in certain feminist circles to reveal personal information, or frame every thought in terms of personal narrative, to the point where we feel disconnected from our own experiences, like we’re mining them for data points or credibility, and how a lot of women I know find this personally humiliating, intellectually demeaning, emotionally draining, and even dangerous, and want neither to produce nor consume the literary products of that expectation
literary because I was talking more about literary genre than politics, to the extent that the two can be separated; it frustrates me that there is little recognition that “memoir” is a genre like any other, manipulated, constructed, and not a wellspring of authentic truth, no more or less the product of the author’s personal experience than any other form of writing, and often — especially in the case of the “confessional” genre — formulaic and cynically commercial
I guess I can’t expect people to automatically gather this if I’m going to be terse, cryptic, and antagonistic on a blogging platform noted for its rapid decontextualisation, and I was almost going to clarify with reference to my personal experience but the irony would be a little too on the nose, and anyway I don’t have the energy or the time, so I’m just going to hope the reblogs die down I guess
having said all that, if you can look me in the eye and tell me “eat, pray, love” and “bringing up bebe” and the like are vital contributions to a transformative feminist movement, bring it on
