Keeping Mum or freeing the Madwoman in the Attic? Challenging the patriarchy, gathering voice and seeking change in conversation with my foremothers and Hélène Cixous with Jan Bradford (Independent Academic)
A BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Event
7 May 2025 (1700-1800)
Online
About the Event
Keeping Mum or freeing the Madwoman in the Attic? Challenging the patriarchy, gathering voice and seeking change in conversation with my foremothers and Hélène Cixous with Jan Bradford (Independent Academic)
Abstract
Hélène Cixous (1976) calls for women to practice écriture féminine – to write themselves, to write about women, and to bring other women to writing - because writing is “precisely the very possibility of change” (p. 879) and “the future must no longer be determined by the past”(p. 875). This presentation relates the story of how, in accepting Cixous’ call to write Woman, I discover a feminist writing voice that encourages me to challenge my narrative inheritance (Goodall, 2005. As I gently question oft-well-told family stories and established cultural narratives, my practice of écriture féminine leads me to steadily deconstruct the ‘truth’ of the classed and gendered narratives I am clothed in. Staring into the eyes of my foremothers – I find myself face-to-face with a commanding sensuous knowing – a knowing that both “tells and transports” and involves “knowing and doing” (Gordon, 2008, p. 205). This sensuous knowing challenges me to free myself from the shackles of the past. To seek justice for the wronged. To actively write what has been silenced. But can I accept the challenge? Am I afraid to speak out? Or do I set my madwoman-self free from the attic to write and advocate for change?
Registration
- Auto/biography Study Group Member/BSA Member: FREE
- Non-Member: £10
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