`I am not a woman writer'

Abstract

This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 63 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.