Speaking Out, Writing Stories: Feminist Politics and Literary Practices
In this paper I explore the intersection of literature and politics in women’s autobiographical writings on rape and sexual violence. This growing genre emerged in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement’s commitment to ‘speaking out’ and telling their stories of sexual violence. Rooted in feminist consciousness-raising practices, these published autobiographies generally share a determination to tell the hidden truth of women’s experiences. In this way, feminist story-telling, which seeks to equate itself with transparent ‘truth-telling’, is presented as existing in opposition to fictional and literary modes of writing. However, I argue that this ideal of feminist narrative is both impossible to achieve and, more importantly, politically undesirable. The ‘truest’ and most direct accounts of experience, structured as they are through literary conventions, inevitably incorporate elements of fiction. Beyond this, the political efficacy of women’s narratives of violence is not the result of their approximation to the truth, but arises from their literary force, from the ways that storytelling can compel affective and ethical responses. To disavow and deny this literary force demonstrates a limited understanding of the political potential of storytelling. Particularly, it limits the control that women are able to exercise over the deployment and political impacts of their narratives. Drawing on differing examples of narrative practice within the genre, I argue that writing and treating these stories as literature enables women to utilise the force of literary and generic conventions rather than simply being bound to them. It allows for the possibility that the meaning of their stories is not an existing truth waiting to be uncovered, but a conclusion that needs to be written.