Introduction to Women's Writing

Women’s writing across the world and in India has, since the beginning, also seen the trend of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writing.  This trend garnered greater vogue in the latter half of the twentieth century when ‘authentic realist’ feminist reading practices stressed on the importance of knowing about the experiences of other women through literature which would feed into their understanding of their own lives. Such intellectual engagements with the lives of other women helped women readers make sense of their own lives. 

 By examining women as recipients of literary texts, we can analyze how they employ these texts to challenge the narratives imposed on them by the society. Feminist theories, therefore, concern themselves with not only women as writers or producers of texts but also as readers and consumers. Like their Western counterpart, autobiographical writings by women in India have been endowed with increasing critical and scholarly attention. 

 Feminism in today’s times is a sprawling, manifold academic and political concept. It insists on being change-oriented rather than being simply a theoretical framework devoid of practical applications. Feminists argue against the creation of a distinct academic field and instead insist on integration with other fields of knowledge. To ensure this, the inclusion of feminist values in the field of research is seen as an important manoeuvre. 

The ultimate aim is to create the space and opportunity to unravel the pervasive inequality present in the society, and suggest ways of dealing with the same. Most critical works have, therefore, tried to engage with ‘materiality’ of texts, that is, with the works’ non-fictional aspects or the works’ grounding in reality.

 Latter-day materialists have actually suggested that materiality brings to the fore ‘things that matter’. Over the years, feminism has moved from its limited scope to encompass a more critical understanding of women’s experience. 

 Not only are there different types of feminisms (Liberal, Marxist, Social, Ecological, Cyber etc.) but the very meaning of the term ‘feminism’ is open to debate and negotiation. From Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated epithet “one is not born, but becomes, a woman”, to notions of gender performativity, to the acknowledgement given to subversive and ‘queer’ gender identities, feminism and gender studies have definitely come a long way and have always been in a state of flux. 

 Over the last few years, a growing body of work has explored the concept of ‘doing gender’, that is, exploring how one’s gender is enacted in social situations and interactions. Theorists today have also started analyzing how body movements and gestures have also come to be recognized in terms of an abiding gendered self. Suggestions have also been made with regard to looking at feminism not as a movement about women but about how performativity discourses prevalent in a society produce the categories of man/woman and masculine/feminine. 

 The largely heteronormative codes that have been followed for long preclude the possibility of reflecting on the experiences of certain individuals (gays, lesbians, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals etc.) In the past few years, feminists have engaged with LGBTQ+ identities in their works and have examined the part that literature can play in understanding how diverse sexual relationships play out. 

 Modern protagonists at once belong everywhere and nowhere. A perpetual jostling for turf is evident in most works. In disproving the myth of the heteronormative society, they bring to light a whole gamut of diverse sexual manifestations. 

 Gender, therefore, still remains a topic of much contention and debate. Apart from the concerns of LGBTQ+ identities, feminists have also tried to incorporate other oppositional movements in their fight for gender equality, thereby widening their outreach. They have linked feminist movements to anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti-classist, environmentalist, and other movements. 

 Thus, feminism has come to subsume many areas of knowledge and experience. In the words of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The cogency of female literary culture as a whole lies in the multiplicity of its voices and its insistence upon the collective foundation of individual consciousness”