Gender, community and authorship
Location: AgC233.1 (upper floor).
Programme
Friday (October 9):
15.00-15.30 (Introduction) Kati Launis (University of Turku): Where are all the Finnish female Working-class writers?
Kirsti Salmi-Niklander (University of Helsinki): Community and gender
15.30-16.00 Viola Parente-Čapková (University of Turku): (Anti)mimesis and the Issue of Female Creativity and Authorship in the Modernist Women’s Writing
16.00-16.30 Dilek Direnç (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey): Women Writers Revise Myths: Reinventing Gender or Gendered Reinventions
16.30-17.00 Maarit Leskelä-Kärki (University of Turku, Finland): Biographical Writing as Women’s Tradition
Saturday (October 10):
10.00-10.30 Toshihiro Kawano (University of Paris, France): Dialogue in the Margins of Community: Gender Matters in the Work of Marguerite Duras
10.30-11.00 Päivi Alho (University of Helsinki): The encounter with the contrasexual
11.00-11.30 Susan Alice Fischer (Medgar Evers College, New York, USA): Re-envisioning Community in Contemporary British Women’s Novels
11.30-12.00 Discussion
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Introduction
Launis, Kati: Where are all the Finnish Female Working-Class Writers?
In my short presentation I’m going to deal with the different ways class intersects with authorship and gender. Class, as well as gender, are crucial elements in the process of authorship, writing and reading. The examples through which I’m illuminating this come from the Finnish working-class writers. How was it possible that a self-educated working-class writer Kössi Kaatra rose from the extreme poverty to the “court poet” of the movement? And, first of all, the question of absence: where were all the Finnish female working-class writers? The presentation connects with my present study titled “From Estate to Class: Discourses in class in Finnish literature”. The aim of this project is to study the discourses on class and illuminating the history of the concept of class in Finnish literature from the 1840’s past the civil war to the 1920’s. During these decades the transition from estate or corporative system to class society took place in the Finnish society. In my opinion literature is a central and to a great extent unexplored area where class differences have been discussed and analyzed – and where one can ”trace” the history of these processes. It constitutes a kind of unique, historical mental ”archives” (different from for example the so called mainstream history writing) to study the written history of class discourses in the context of the certain historical period.
Salmi-Niklander, Kirsti: Community and gender
I am going to discuss shortly the relations of community and gender. Communities can be coherent groups in face-to-face contacts, or more loose groups which share common values and identities. As examples of various terms which relate community with authorship I take up speech and performance communities (Roger Abrahams, Keith Basso), textual communities (Brian Stock) and discursive communities (Linda Hutcheon). How is gender discussed, produced and performed in these groups? In my study on hand-written newspapers in 19th- and early 20th-century Finland I have developed the term conversational community, by which I mean a group of people in close interaction, who create, adapt and interpret texts presented in oral and literary form. The members of a conversational community are tied with each other with social and/or economical bonds. I present shortly the some results of my doctoral thesis “Self-education and rebellion” (Itsekasvatusta ja kapinaa 2004), which is a study on the oral-literary tradition of the working-class young people in Karkkila, a small industrial town in Southern Finland. I have interpreted the conflicts and co-operation between the young men and women with Yvonne Hirdman’s (1988) term “gender choreography”. Hirdman defines gender choreography as a negotiation on the terms of the gender pact: men and women can explore the borders of the gender pact, how long can they go in order take the full advantage of this pact? In the community of the young men and women in Högfors the gender choreography could be expressed both verbally and with concrete action. A close reading of the hand-written newspaper Valistaja and other documents reveals that the co-operation of young men and women was, in fact, a constant wave motion between dialogue, silencing and resistance.
Approved participants in alphaphetical order
Alho, Päivi: The encounter with the contrasexual
The passionate story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler would loose its spellbound tension without the second pair in the drama, the calm Ashley and Melanie. Together these four personalities represent the classical projections that also take place in many ordinary relationships. Some of the projected elements are of real and some of illusory origins; some of the emotions are superfluous, while others are missing. The female and male psychologies find their true being and independence partly through the encounter with the contrasexual. In the encounter, the personal experience of the emotional life of the opposite gender has the capacity to solve the ambivalent prejudices and expectations projected onto the contrasexual. The task is, however, much more difficult than we realise, yet described in varying ways by innumerable tales throughout human history. A few examples that enlighten the emotional problems and how they are solved are presented. Recent neuroscientific evidence adds an interesting dimension in the play.
Direnç, Dilek: Women Writers Revise Myths: Reinventing Gender or Gendered Reinventions
“We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.” Adrienne Rich
Starting from the early twentieth century “revisionist mythmaking” in women’s writing has been a strategy widely used by women writers to resist and reinvent tradition as they turn their attention to well-defined and almost universally accepted stories to transform them in surprisingly fresh ways. American poet Alicia Ostriker observes that women bring “female knowledge of female experience” into the old story “in which familiar figures from male tradition emerge altered” (14), for the author “simultaneously deconstructs a prior ‘myth’ or ‘story’ and constructs a new one which includes, instead of excluding, herself” (12). Thus, revising myths is as much an ideological project as it is a literary invention strategy for women writers who attempt to revise culture and gender as they reinvent “the writing of the past” (Rich 2046). Women writers of diverse cultural backgrounds have utilized revisionist mythmaking inventively in various genres to counterpoint the privileged male narratives of traditional myths and their representations of gender. This paper intends to focus on reinvented texts by writers of different cultural backgrounds, the American authors Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and Eleanor Wilner, the Canadian Margaret Atwood, and the Turkish Ayla Kutlu, to argue that recreating myths has been a central activity in twentieth century women’s writing across cultures. These writers rework old stories to incorporate women’s voice, experience, and vision into them. Giving voice to the silent woman and narrating the story of the “other,” or the other side of the story, their narratives come together in a spirit of defiance against a tradition that deny woman a voice and a self as subject. The stolen language enables the writers and the female speaking subjects in their texts to reconceptualize female identities as they produce new visions and genders.
Fischer, Susan Alice: ‘Re-envisioning Community in Contemporary British Women’s Novels’
This paper looks at the ways turn-of-the millennium British novels by women of a range of backgrounds re-envisage community. Such novels often conceive of community in opposition to the hegemonic culture, emphasise the intersectionalities of gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality, and draw upon a plurality of voices to represent diversity within the communities they imagine. Written at a time in contemporary British society when competing discourses about national identity have emerged, these multi-voiced and multi-perspectival narratives counter patriarchal, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic tendencies and offer, instead, an inclusive vision of community. Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch recuperate histories of oppressed and marginalised communities during WWII and the postwar period. By creating intersecting histories of communities of women, working-class people, Caribbean migrants, lesbian and gay men, the authors also reconceptualise community for the present and the future. Maggie Gee’s The White Family and The Flood—set in present-day and futuristic communities respectively—similarly envision inclusive communities by highlighting the disastrous consequences of failing to value all identities. These authors suggest that individual identity and community can flourish only when we cease to use divisions to bolster the power of one group over another and when we honour and find connection across differences.
Kawano, Toshihiro: Dialogue in the Margins of Community: Gender Matters in the Work of Marguerite Duras
Recent discussions have often been cautious about putting forth a single concept of community because it can exclude others who do not share, or possibly, who do not have, the adequate criteria for belonging to the community. This paper examines the question of sharing and possession in terms of community. It does so through discussing the extent to which the excluded others can imagine the community from its margins by calling into question the conditions of sharing and possession. My discussion proceeds with an interpretation of a dialogue between a man and a woman—both outsiders to community—in Marguerite Duras’ The Square. The dialogue in that novel can be seen to position the very point of miscommunication between man and woman as the instance of the possibility of sharing and possession. In this way, I bring the question of gender into theoretical reflections on community. In short, through reference to the theoretical concept of community provided by a contemporary of Duras, Maurice Blanchot, the essay discusses the possibility of imagining the community of the margins in the (gendered) margins of community.
Leskelä-Kärki, Maarit: Biographical writing as women’s tradition
In my paper I will analyse the relationship between authorship, class and gender from the viewpoint of biographical writing. Biographical writing seems to have been one important genre where non-academic women writers took part in constructing the national history of Finland and the traditions of historical research. It is thus worths asking, what was women’s role in developing this genre. My analysis is based on my research dealing with three prominent figures in Finnish biographical writing from the early 1900’s until the 1980’s. Helena Westermarck, Helmi Krohn and Tyyni Tuulio all came from upper middle-class backgrounds, and they focused on writing biographies particularly on professional women in different fields of art and science of their own class. In my paper I will, in particular, pay attention to the role Tyyni Tuulio had as a biographical writer from the 1950’s onwards. What kind of authorship did she promote in her writings, and why did she choose those women she chose as the key figures of her biographies? How did she saw the role of biography as a literary genre and as a means to construct Finnish cultural history?
Parente-Čapková, Viola: (Anti)mimesis and the Issue of Female Creativity and Authorship in the Modernist Women’s Writing
A strong tendency in the Modernist writing was formed by currents that have been often characterised as anti-mimetic, i.e. opposed to the realist concept of mimesis. I am interested in looking at what this tendency meant for the women writers, who thematized the issue of female creativity especially within the turn-of-the19th-and-the-20th century aestheticist trends that draw inspiration from Nietzscheanism. Within this framework, the construction and understanding of female creativity and authorship were inextricably intertwined with the issues of female subjectivity, further intensified by the fusion of art and life in the fin de siècle thought. The women’s (life)styles and (self)representations, closely connected with the possibilities of agency, played an important role in their ways of becoming (women) writers; the turn-of-the-19th-and-the-20th-century preoccupation with the self, the concept of “becoming through art”, acquire special meanings when analysed in women writers. The anti-mimetic trend, characterised by emphasis on intertextuality and the tradition of imitatio, opened a wide range of possibilities of textual strategies, but was also a challenge for the women writers, whose work had been, traditionally and mostly disparagingly, labeled as unoriginal and imitative. In my inquiry, I am going to use several case studies as examples of the strategies that women writers adopted within this aesthetico-political framework in particular contexts, particular discursive communities.
Last update 5.10.2009.
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