IMAGINING WOMEN: On gender and genre by Rebecca Giggs →
Joan Didion wrote that the impression Time and other journals conveyed of the feminist movement of the early 1970s was of activists motivated not by any socio-economic worldview but by a ‘collective, inchoate yearning for “fulfilment” or “self expression”, a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas.’ This anachronistic, psychosocial account of feminism – politics as just another release of women’s repressed creativity – persists in subtle ways today. In literature, it is expressed in an understanding of women’s writing as therapy, as diary-work, as constructive disclosure: a creative practice that privileges an inner self, rather than pushing outwards in dialogue with institutions and histories.
(Source: ahipstory, via ourcatastrophe)
