/lit/ - Literature

Why is women’s writing invariably reduced to the personal, or dismissed as “confessional”? This week, my book Unspeakable Things is published in the UK and in the standard set of interviews you do when you have a book out – in which you turn up in a clean T-shirt and try not to sound stupid – that’s the one question that has come up every time. Why do you write about “personal issues”? Why do you include your own experiences when you speak about sex, power and politics – and such intimate experiences, too? Why do you talk about addiction and date rape and television? Aren’t you being too “provocative”? Aren’t you being too “confessional”, as women always are?

The first point is that when men write about their experiences in a political context, it’s never called “confessional” – it’s just “literature”, or a “memoir”. The second is that male political experience is never coded as male – it’s just universal truth.

In five years as a columnist and commentator who also happens to be young, sexy and female, I have lost count of the times I have been encouraged by editors to write about being a woman, in a way that is “provocative” without really challenging sexism. I have been encouraged to be a “voice” for young women – to draw attention away from how most newspapers’ political pages are still dominated by men’s words, men’s agendas.

Now that I’m lucky enough to be able to pick and choose, I often hear the same thing from younger women writers: that they can pay their rent, or have their pitches listened to, only if they write about fashion or diets or dating in a way that is modestly feminist but still fluffy enough to sit within the “women’s pages”, which are usually part of a paper’s lifestyle section by virtue of not being considered serious politics.... read more from our queen:

>http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/feminist-writers-dilemma-how-write-about-personal-without-becoming-story