Monday, August 8, 2011

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing, pages 47-48

If women's experience is defined as inferior to, less important than, or "narrower" than men's experience, women's writing is automatically denigrated.

If women's experience is simply not seen, the effect will be the same.

She wrote it but look what she wrote about becomes She wrote it, but it's unintelligible/badly constructed/thin/spasmodic/uninteresting, etc., a statement by no means identical with She wrote it, but I can't understand it (in which case the failure might be with the reader). Behind She wrote it, but it's unintelligible lies the premise: What I don't understand doesn't exist, like Sylvia Plath's "hysteria" which came "completely out of herself," or the woman trying to get into our M.A. program who could not possibly want to beat "her" husband over the head with a frying pan unless there was a "failure of communication" in that particular marriage.

The social invisibility of women's experience is not a "failure of human communication." It is a socially arranged bias persisted in long after the information about women's experience is available (sometimes even publicly insisted upon).

It is (although the degree thereof varies from circumstance to circumstance) bad faith.

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