Women Writing Across Cultures

Book excerpt: This collection brings together an international, multicultural, multilingual, and multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in different media seeking to question and re-theorize the contested terms of our title: “woman,” “writing,” “women’s writing,” and “across.” “Culture” is translated into an open series of interconnected terms and questions. How might one write across national cultures; or across a national and a minority culture; or across disciplines, genres, and media; or across synchronic discourses that are unequal in power; or across present and past discourses or present and future discourses? The collection explores and develops recent feminist, queer, and transgender theory and criticism, and also aesthetic practice. “Writing across” assumes a number of orientations: posthumanist; transtemporal; transnationalist; writing across discourses, disciplines, media, genres, genders; writing across pronouns – he, she, they; writing across literature, non-literary texts, and life. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.