The best selling 'classics' of the women's movement
including Lisa Alther's
Kinflicks, Anja Meulenbelt's
The
Shame is Over, Kate Millet's
Sita, Marilyn French's
The
Woman's Room, Rita Mae Brown's
Ruby Fruit Jungle and Erica
Jong's
Fear of Flying originate din the United States. But they
were read and discussed by countless women in Britain and throughout
the world. This workshop will explore a number of questions relating
to the feminist sexual confessionals of the 1970s: Why were they read
so avidly? What kinds of relationships between cultural analysis, consciousness-raising
and political praxis do such novels suggest? Was the feminist best-seller
a contradiction at a time when feminists themselves were often pilloried?
Was the expression of sexual desire fiction written by women (heterosexual
as well as lesbian) liberating
per se? and did this have different
meanings for men and for women? To what extent were these novels able
to politicise women as part of a process of consciousness-raising?
This workshop will be based on ideas developed in my recent book
on women's writing, Contemporary Women's Writing from The Golden
Notebook to The Color Purple (2001). I hope to circulate
extracts from some of the above novels for discussion and that other
women will wish to talk about the fiction which influenced them, perhaps
bringing their own books or extracts. I want to ask how well the
feminist confessionals have survived after they have been cut adrift
from their moorings in the women's movement? I am particularly interested
in the responses to this fiction of younger women who may not have
been born in the 1970s.
return to
conference