Writing the Body

Researcher: Alison Bartlett

This project is interested in particular forms of writing as significantly feminist in their politics and poetics. Drawing on ‘French feminist theories’ of ecriture feminine as employed by Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, the emergence of corporeality and subjectivity in narrative (in its many forms) are understood to be crucial devices in the production and circulation of knowledge. Alternately, it is also understood that specific forms of corporeality and subjectivity are produced through discourse. An offshoot of this project has been the ways in which lactating bodies are discursively produced in postmodernity through medical, media and public health discourses, and the implications for feminism and for breastfeeding women.

The project is also concerned with how such research may be written. As such, it intersects with the Australian-named form of 'fictocriticism'. While fictocriticism is claimed as both postmodernist and feminist (sometimes together, sometimes apart), its need to ‘make a difference’, to draw attention to its own performance and media, and to locate the writer’s partiality in relation to their topic, claims an ethical position that is useful to feminist work. This project is interested in the uses of such writing: its use to academics, students, writers, feminists; its more recent use in the service of whiteness studies and Australian reconciliation practices; its use as writing and as a politics of writing.

Outcomes