“How to torpedo the writing of women” by Joanna Russ: anatomy of an invisibilization

Sabotage manual – "how torpedo writing women" joanna

In the United States, in 1983, Joanna Russ published a book that has lost nothing of her bite. Furthermore, She draws up a methodical inventory of a thousand. Therefore, one ways that women who dare to write are prevented, disparaged, erased. Meanwhile, No frontal censorship. For example, but a whole diffuse and relentless arsenal: the time confiscated by domestic work, the early discouragement of vocations, the suspicion of imposture (“it is not she who wrote it”), the condescending contempt (“it is she who wrote it, but she would have done better to abstain”), until the relegation of the rare authors recognized. Nevertheless, In doing so. Therefore, Russ composes a counter-history of literature: that of all those that we wanted to reduce to silence, but also that of those who resisted. Similarly, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, “how torpedo writing women” joanna George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Ursula Le Guin … So many names that mark a underground crossing of literary history.

Count the absent

Opening Russ today is a strange experience. We say to ourselves: “But all that, I already know it”. Yes, women were invisible. Yes, their writing potential was restrained. Was it really a test to hammer it? And then we remember that Russ wrote over forty years ago. long before feminist criticism is democratized, and we understand better the pioneering scope of his text. What makes reading fascinating is not so much the thesis as the demonstration: the precision with which it exhibits each strategy. each justification invented to discredit an author, as a catalog of patriarchal tricks. And above all. this impression of vertigo: we know the mechanism, but we still ignore the faces of those he has erased. In “how torpedo writing women” joanna the end. we can’t help but take the test: how many names among the authors mentioned are familiar to us? How many books have we really read? The gap is abysmal. So yes. the test is old, but it acts as a revealer: it shows less what you know that what you don’t read. And it gives passing a vertiginous list of upcoming readings. So many empty rays that remains to be filled.