Writing and Writing Instruction in Different Academic Contexts
FEMINIST WRITING PRACTICE? TEXTS, WOUNDS, WISHES
Judith Wolfsberger
Writers´studio, Vienna, Austria
In her 1928 speech to the first generation of female college students at Cambridge Virginia Woolf said: Women need “a room of [their] own and 500 guniees a year” to be able to write. In her 1994 essay “A Room of Ones Own is not Enough” the USAmerican writing therapist Joan Bolker diagnoses an epidemic of writing blocks among female doctoral students. Women have trouble finding their voice in the “father tongue” of academic writing and feel they have to choose between connectedness and academic success in male oriented structures. In 2014 I was invited by a group of female doctoral students at the University of Weimar, Germany, to give a workshop on “Feminist Writing Practice”. We wanted to start thinking anew about what feminist writing practice could be and what it would need to flourish. After 1.5 days of writing about feminists texts on writing, their own experiences and wishes my students produced astonishing manifestos for a new feminist writing practice. In my workshop we will discuss the relation between women and (teaching) academic writing using quotes of Virginia Woolf, Joan Bolker, Donna Haraway and the new Weimar feminist manifestos. Then each participant will be invited to do a freewriting about her own experiences as a writer in academia, to explore possible barriers, wounds, fears or angers. At the end we will produce bits and pieces for further manifestos for strategies to support and promote women as academic writers.
References
BOLKER, J. (1994) A room of one's own is not enough. Tikkun. Vol. 9 Issue 6 (Reprinted in: BOLKER, J. (ed.) (1997) The Writer's Home Companion: An Anthology of the World's Best Writing Advice, from Keats to Kunitz . New York: Henry Holt & Co)
HARAWAY, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies , Vol. 14, No. 3.
WOLFSBERGER J. (2010) Frei geschrieben: Mut, Freiheit und Strategie für wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten . 3. Aufl. Wien: UTB Böhlau.
WOLFSBERGER J. (2014) A weekly dose of applause! Connectedness and Playfulness in the Thesis Marathon. In AITCHISON, C. and GUERIN, C. (eds). Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond: Innovations in practice and theory. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
WOOLF V. (2008) A Room of Ones Own, and Three Guineas (Oxford World's Classics) Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.