EKSwitaj As part of their preview of their upcoming This Is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like Forum, the experimental poetics blog, Delirious hem has posted a provocative piece about feminism and disability from poet Jennifer Bartlett. In it, she notes several areas in which feminism has failed to advocate for women with disabilities:
Sometimes, I feel like the community has forgotten us! Despite wonderful strides toward inclusion in many areas of feminism, disability is often the overlooked element. The issues of women with disabilities are among the most extreme cases of female abuse in the United States. So, it is shocking to that the pages of MS. Magazine are not full of issues such as forced sterilization or the fact that some women with disabilities have their children forcefully taken away at birth. Many people do still do not know about abusive institutions, such as Willowbrook, which were the norm as late as the 1980’s. The unemployment rate for women with disabilities remains at a steady 70% or more.
It is important to remember when criticizing the mainstream feminist movement for such shortcomings that feminism did not create these problems. The kyriarchy and power structures that place women with disabilities at a particular disadvantage were there long before feminism. That does not mean, however, that feminism should not be held responsible for failures to address these issues. To create a truly liberatory movement, we who identify as feminists must constantly reevaluate ourselves and our actions to see if we are doing enough for all women.
Jennifer goes on to ask three questions about disabilities and feminism… (Read more at Gender Across Borders.)
EKSwitaj Early on in an opinion-piece about what women’s writing is and ought to be (h/t), Rachel Cusk writes:
When a woman in 2010 sits down to write, she perhaps feels rather sexless. She is inclined neither to express nor deny: she’d rather be left alone to get on with it. She might even nurture a certain hostility towards the concept of ”women’s writing”. Why should she be politicised when she doesn’t feel politicised? It may even, with her, be a point of honour to keep those politics as far from her prose as it is possible to get them.
That “perhaps” isn’t there to weaken the writing: it’s there to mark the whole passage as speculation so that she can wiggle away from providing any actual examples. She, of course, does not know what any other woman feels when she sits down to write. There are certainly, however, many contemporary writers whose writing shows a clear awareness of their being women and of the experience of womanhood. I just finished reading Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows which is at its core the story of one woman’s life from the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki to post-9/11 New York. The novel explores storylines that follow the men she has been connected with but always returns to her situation, experience, and perspective. Then there’s Margaret Atwood, of whom Cusk surely is not unaware; could anyone account for Atwood’s work within hostility towards “women’s writing”?
So why is Cusk making such unsupported claims about women writers?
