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Editorial Statement
MARY EAGLETON and SUSAN STANFORD FRIEDMAN

Contemporary Womens Writing offers a space where the field of contemporary

womens writing can be explored, challenged, extended, and defined. Recognizing the
richness of womens writing from across the world, we welcome discussion of all
literatures, not only those written in English. We encourage as well the full panoply of
scholarly approaches to womens writingfrom the theoretical to the historical, from
the formalist to the sociological, from the material to the cultural, from the stylistic to
the linguistic, from the political to the ethical. We are not a creative writing journal, in
the sense of publishing original poems or short stories, but we do recognize how
writing may be innovative in its stylistic mode, at once, creative and critical. And we
hope to foster interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative perspectives on
contemporary womens writing.
In titling the journal Contemporary Womens Writing, we intend to stimulate
consideration of how the field itself has changed over the past three decades or
more. One of the many contradictions which bedevilled the explosion of interest in
contemporary womens writing in the late 1970s was the curious alignment of global
claims alongside a politically unsustainable narrowness. Thus, on the one hand, there
was a sense that womens writing everywhere had been suppressed by patriarchal
forces and, in truth, there was no shortage of evidence about womens illiteracy rates,
their difficulty in getting into print, or the critical devaluing of what they did produce.
The feminist criticism of the period would often refer to womens writing as hidden,
silenced, absent. Most dramatically, in Hel`ene Cixous iconic essay The Laugh
of the Medusa (1976), womens writing became a volcanic force waiting to erupt.
Yet, on the other hand, the work that was published and popularized wasin terms
of class, race, geographyhighly selective and, overwhelmingly, the product of white,
middle-class women from Britain, Europe, and North America. Conceptually too,
arguments often moved between ultra-specificlooking for that unique and unifying

Contemporary Womens Writing 1:1/2 December 2007. doi:10.1093/cww/vpm021

c The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.


For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

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characteristic within womens writing which would establish its difference from mens
writingand a breadth which, as Peggy Kamuf pointed out, produced only tautological
statements of dubious value: womens writing is writing signed by women (1980).
More than thirty years on from this period, we want to attest to the continuing
difficulty and yet productiveness and viability of this phrase contemporary womens
writing. Exploring its potential and problems will be both an explicit and implicit
focus of this journal. In our inaugural double issue, we feature a Roundtable on
Contemporary Womens Writing to spark some debate and the preliminary
delineation of future directions for the field. Although this roundtable will not be
regular feature for the journal, we hope this initial set of reflections will stimulate
further theorization about the field in subsequent issues. To set the framework for
debate, we offer a brief unraveling of the three terms of the journals
titlecontemporary, womens, and writingso as to give some indication of
the work to be done.

Contemporary By contemporary we mean, roughly, post 1970, though for writers

of longevitylike Adrienne Rich, Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, or Flora Nwapaone
might well want to consider work that pre-dates 1970. Demarcating the period is, at
once, a practical necessity and a trigger to critical questions. What are the conditions
of late twentieth-century- and early twenty-first-century history that shape and
reflect womens writing? Is the field defined predominantly by this phase of
globalization, with its intensified movement of peoples, goods, money, cultural
practices and products, and armies and the attendant cultural hybridities and ruptures
such movements create? How do the forces of nationalism and transnationalism, of
race, religion, and sexualities in a global landscape play out in womens writing? We are
strongly conscious of the fraught global pressures contained in our historical moment
and how spatial modes of thinking are integral to the concerns and metaphors of our
times this historical moment. As Foucault predicted in his prescient essay, Of Other
Spaces (1967, 1984), space has gained recent and compensatory cogency as a
framework for analysis, not as an erasure of the temporal but as a necessary
complement to it. One needs only to look at the essay titles in this collection to
appreciate the central preoccupation with space, place, geography, and location.

Womens Few now would consider women a self-evident category. We know too
much about the differences between women, bolstered by structural and personal
inequalities; we are too conscious of the problems in claiming a coherent identity; we
are resistant to being defined only by sexual difference. Women, like men, are
multiply positioned. A womans identity and writing can never be understood within
the single framework of sex/gender. Intersectional analysis, a cornerstone of feminist
theory today, has necessarily changed the terrain of womens writing and our ways of
exploring it. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, caste sexuality, body, nation, colonialism,
and transnationthese and other constituents of identity mediate expressions and
performance of gender.

Contemporary Womens Writing 1:1/2 December 2007

M. Eagleton and S. S. Friedman r Editorial Statement

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Even the category of sex/gender falls apart at the slash. What, after all, is a
woman in the context of transgendered phenomena? Should this journal examine
work by MTF (male to female) transgendered writers, by FTM (female to male)? If
there is not one sex but many and a spectrum of genders, what is contemporary
womens writing? Certainly, women writers do not have to write all the time about
gender or sexuality, about being a woman, and the essays in this first issue are
ample evidence of the range of interest. Nor does the focus on the woman writer
necessitate discussions that isolate women from their affiliations with male writers;
consideration of the male author can effectively illuminate the female author. Rather
than move toward fixing the category of women, we anticipate that the journals
implicit comparative reach will establish a conversation among diverse women, a
dialog as open to challenges and conflict as affiliation and correspondence.

Writing We intend for the journal to consider all literary genres and forms but we
are also interested in how the literary as a concept might be questioned. Over
thirty years ago, feminist criticism challenged normative understandings of the
literary by incorporating ignored or undervalued genres such as letters, diaries, and
autobiographies into the concept of womens writing. Today, such challenges need to
continue, with new issues to face. For example, one persons serious literary fiction is
the next persons lit lite (to use Debbie Taylors 2006 coinage) or the next persons
pulp fiction. The increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for
reading the polyvocality of texts. Moreover, we need to think of what writing means
in a digitalized age where computers are revolutionizing knowledge production,
dissemination, and the very ways in which people think, read, and write. The visual
and the verbal, in a huge array of forms, are increasingly intermingled as the
centuries-long dominance of print culture yields to the digital. Equally productive are
those porous borders where writing works alongside other discourses and practices
(art history, genetics, the social sciences, for instance) and such border-crossings may
be as much concerned with new methodologies or stylistic approaches as with new
concepts. Finally, the author may not be sitting in a room of her own, on her own, but
writing a script or a screenplay, fully involved in a collaborative act of dramatic
production or filmmaking.
We understand how the field of contemporary womens writing is shifting in
composition, meaning, and focus but that is not the same as saying it is without
composition, meaning and focus and, hence, this journals interest in links, dialogues,
debates between women writers. Virginia Woolf observed in A Room of Ones Own
that when scores of middle-class women picked up the pen to write some 200 years
ago, the walls shook and shattered. The constituency of women writers is now,
thankfully, much wider but the need for shaking and shattering is still as great. We
look forward to the reverberations.
Mary Eagleton, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Contemporary Womens Writing 1:1/2 December 2007

M. Eagleton and S. S. Friedman r Editorial Statement