The techniques for mystifying women's lives and belittling women's writing that I have described work by suppressing context: writing is separated from experience, women writers are separated from their tradition and each other, public is separated from private, political from personal--all to enforce a supposed set of absolute standards. What is frightening about black art or women's art or Chicano art--and so on--is that it calls into question the very idea of objectivity and absolute standards:
This is a good novel.
Good for what?
Good for whom?
One side of the nightmare is that the privileged group will not recognize that "other" art, will not be able to judge it, that the superiority of taste and training possessed by the privileged critic and the privileged artist will suddenly vanish.
The other side of the nightmare is not that what is found in the "other" art will be incomprehensible, but that it will be all too familiar. That is:
Women's lives are the buried truth about men's lives.
The lives of people of color are the buried truth about white lives.
The buried truth about the rich is who they take their money from and how.
The buried truth about "normal" sexuality is how one kind of sexual expression has been made privileged, and what kinds of unearned virtue and terrors about identity this distinction serves.
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