Writing as a woman

I too have been fascinated by this discussion at several places about women and blogging, which I think is a kind canon formation argument but w/ regard to blogs. It reminded me of this essay by Carla Harryman at However. A relevant quote:

The question is: Whose goal is it to usher anything into the canon? And how, as a writer to engage actively and publicly in literary practice without turning oneself over to false representations? I am by the way talking less about achieving public fame or notoriety than I am about fantasy structures of power that are silencing, that prevent writers for instance from addressing critically their own and other writers’ works. Women must be able to speak critically and analytically about each other’s and others’ (men’s, writers’ different from "herself," critics’, and theorists’) works or we will be misrecognized. However, if such writing about is about canon-formation, then the misrecognitions will persist along with an endless series of misnamings.

What I mean in the most simple sense here is that the writing about needs to attend carefully to difference, to awkwardness, to misfittings rather than to have as a primary goal the fitting of the "innovative" text into conventional categories. After all, the power of the "different" text lies in what it suggests about other ways of seeing and imagining writing. If one wants the implication of a vision to develop, then fitting the radical object into the square peg of patriarchal canon-making narratives is not only an inaccurate way of proceeding but one that reinforces values that the art object itself critiques. I do not mean that mediating language is not necessary for creating readings of and preserving writing but that reductive readings that are about norms and values the texts themselves reject or call into question can produce a kind of textual powerlessness.