Are women writers now sexless?

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?

(Read more at Daughter of the Ring of Fire)