Creative writing as feminist freedom

‘Ulrika, what does a professor do?’, the kid asked me as I was trying on my mother’s 50-year-old hot pink silk evening dress for my upcoming professorial installation in the Ivory Tower, an old Swedish university, a few years back. We had picked up the delicate garment, sewn for my mother by (woman’s) hand in my grandmother’s village before I was born, from the drag queen seamstress who had altered it to fit my much flatter chest. While I was pondering how to respond, and indeed, what the dress had to do with my job as such, the second grader answered her own question, with a proud voice: ‘She reads and writes’. ¹

Growing up in a multi-household queer matriarchy (complete with kittens) in Scandinavia, a frosty part of the world that likes to congratulate itself for its world-leading levels of gender equality, there is nothing strange about the girl’s choice of professorial pronouns. Yet, after the long process of assessment, evaluation and presentation required for promotion, the labour and long-seeming impossibility of it all, it was then and there in the bedroom, as my green eyes met her brown in the mirror, that I stepped into its significance. The meaning of that utterance made my heart skip a beat. Interesting – given that much of my reading and writing for said promotion had been concerned with the question of femininity and what difference she makes in (feminist) knowledge production and in (queer) kinship and desire.

In a university founded in 1477, it is a hard fact that only 50 years have passed since the first professor was pronoun(c)ed ‘she’. For most of this institution’s history, women and other others have not been among the learned who, in accordance with the idea of an Ivory Tower, get to view the world from a distance, bestowed with the privilege of naming the world. Instead, hey/we have been (and to a large extent, continue to be) servants, cleaners, care workers, secretaries, wives and, of course, objects of scrutiny and investigation, by the White men of science.

Here I was now, the third (White) professor of gender studies to be installed along with dozens of other new professors from other faculties. Two weeks later, my lover’s daughter endured the 2-h-long academic ritual, ripe with 19th century nationalist sentiments and Latin phrases that bestowed the title on me, her femme ‘bonus mother’, standing out as a blonde hot pink triangle in a sea of tailcoat and dark dress whiteness. The only woman in a tailcoat present in the university hall that day was the girl’s Black mother next to her among our (queer) kin there to witness the spectacle and transformation. What did this brown girl, or anyone in the audience, learn about the place of a profesora and her knowledge, and about the politics of race, gender and sexuality in the Ivory Tower that day? What stories, possibilities and futurities are passed on to her (generation)?

What exactly does and should a feminist professor, or any academic, write? For whom? And why? Like many of us, I came to feminism and its knowledge production not only through activism but through reading and writing. Among many of my peers, a feminist academic life has less to do with reading and writing and more to do with management, resources and supervision. With the growing professionalization and institutionalization of feminist knowledge comes an academic sense of worth and measurement increasingly being defined in numbers; of peer-reviewed articles, citations, signed copyright agreements and copies of the right signs, of output. A model that is not always reflective of quality and that can certainly be stifling to one’s imagination and creativity. The standardized format of the academic article required for CV and career certainly dictates how new creative lines of thought can be thought. As seasoned editors often ask ourselves, is there a limit to how many articles we can read and write? How do we find joy in our writing practices? And what do we teach our students about what counts as feminist knowledge?

Truth be told, the master’s tools continue to fail to dismantle the master’s house, no matter how good we are at following operating instructions or participating in cultures of fear and threat. As discussed before in this Open Forum (Dahl 2022), strong movements are working against us at the moment, against gender (as ideology) and also, against our forms of knowledge. Fascism continues to grow in Europe and across the world, and basic rights are at stake in many places. It bears repeating that this is more true for some groups and subjects than others. . In a moment when we are learning anew that ‘every tool is a weapon if you hold it right’ (as Ani DiFranco once put it) as we witness our concepts and ideas, even our research findings, coopted, weaponized and used against us by the growing far right, I think we need other kinds of writings more than ever; imaginative, transformative work that opens up new worlds and whose value exceed what can be measured.

Yet,on the academic assembly line of ethical approvals, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), monitored storage spaces and neoliberal academic productivity; in a time of continued unrecognized reliance on social reproduction and academic housework, feminists often (unwillingly) become the guardians and defenders of systems, the users and incarcerators rather than challengers of already flawed rules and regulations, of fantasies of security and depoliticized policies. What does academic freedom, freedom of creative expression mean? Well, in a small and relatively simple sense, it is a question to explore in journals like ours, in fora such as this.

Freedom is not an easy question, as Mara Lee points out in this issue, because we are so often more concerned with its perceived opposite, safety (as opposed to captivity). What happens to languages of resistance and to utopian visions; can we imagine a fem(me)inist future of knowledge production otherwise? After all, we are each other’s peers. One line of flight, of stimulation and hope, is to turn to fantasy and poetry; weaving a story together, placing strategic figures and objects there with which to see and think the world. Why? Because we are committed to making a difference, we believe that our work holds that possibility.

I often ask my students to name a reading or author who has changed their lives. While many mention bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed and others and almost always refer to books, when I ask them to name a memorable peer-reviewed article, fewer can mention being moved or altered by any of the growing number of articles now placed on syllabi.

And yet, feminist knowledge production is thick with stories, poetry, rhymes and tales; efforts to redefine language and do science differently. Think of the utopian idea of écriture fem(me)inine, a new language. ‘Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity’ writes Algerian-French feminist Hélène Cixous (1976: 885), whose laugh of the Medusa is a tradition now being queered and extended upon. Indeed, feminist theorizing has deep and strong roots and routes through creative writing. Think of the poetry of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Adrienne Rich, the rich storied traditions of This Bridge called my back and of Creative writings of Radical women of colour at the hands of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga (Anzaldua, 1990; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983), and also about the powerful writings by Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Omiseke Tinsley, and of creative contemporary academic-poets and fiction writers such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Bernadine Evaristo and Zadie Smith.

The present is making abundantly clear that numbers and facts are far from enough to elicit transformation in an affective economy, but there is power in storytelling and in what we pass on. ‘Stories are always more generous, more capacious than ideologies’ writes Donna Haraway (2003: 1), insisting that as feminists we need to keep learning how to inhabit both histories and stories and how to keep lineages. We learn from feminists of colour that storytelling is theory made flesh; borderlands in and across language. Today, many academic feminists write about creative writing (literature and art), and growing numbers turn to or already write creatively, yet we rarely see such writings on the pages of our journals. We can turn to (feminist) writing with a conviction: it matters what stories we tell and how. We need to defend our legacies and build new ones.

This open forum of the European Journal of Women’s Studies is a modest attempt to centre creative writing in the journal. It brings together four pieces, each with its own relation to freedom, creativity and flesh. In the essay ‘The Poetic Imagination and Freedom’ Mara Lee, one of Sweden’s leading contemporary writers, continues her ongoing explorations of metaphors, fantasy and desire, matters most recently explored in Loving others, othering love (Lee, 2022; see also Lee, 2014). Lee considers peacock feathers and numbers, aging feminine desires and metaphors, and in such a context, the idea that mouse is a metaphor for pussy in Swedish adds a layer when considering Canadian Black feminist scholar Jan Mendes’ auto-fictional story ‘Mousetrap’. A rich and poignant tale of distance and desire, it tells of the relationship between writing and fantasy entangled in a postdoc life of movement and relocation, longing and entrapment. Taking a different approach to pleasurable relations with mammals around us, ‘At arm’s length until told otherwise’ by Swedish multispecies ethnographer Andrea Petitt brings in a different kind of poetry, namely, of an ethnographic kind, to consider rhyming as a sensory and creative method of research; a kind of memory work and as an analytic tool. Here, creative writing is an embodied technology, again involving hands, which also guide horses and travel with cows and cowboys.

Finally, in ‘The Queer afterlives of texts’, Estonian feminist and journal co-editor Redi Koobak, who has long been interested in creative writing as a feminist methodology, reflects on the loss of her interlocutor, queer artist Anna-Stina Treumund with whom she worked closely for her thesis on Post-Socialist feminism, shares a story that speaks to ‘the importance of emotions in reflexive research beyond the paralyzing effects of guilt’. ² Koobak whirls new stories of how research and the relations it builds on continues to travel in the world, returning us to the sore and important questions of being differently situated and of different use to one another.

As a collection with overlapping themes and above all, a shared interest in creative writing as a source of feminist knowledge and freedom, these contributions are but a few of the ways in which we live and create at the intersections of pleasure and pain, fear and joy, and always in more-than-human relations in which power itself is an object of scrutiny as well as satisfaction. We hope that these pieces can offer pleasure as well as inspiration for others to consider (sharing) their own creative flows of which we have a multitude.

One often hears students and scholars, myself and colleagues included, say that academic lives are too busy, they do not afford the time and space for (creative) writing, perhaps the institution is not even the right place for it. One might think that writing as feminist freedom requires Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own, or that it can only happen on sabbaticals, writing retreats, research weeks, if one has them. Perhaps we can also think about how writing so often emerges, via encounters, whilst in movement, when we go through transitions, in all those in-between moments, those small tears in a tight time schedule. On the commuter train, those few lines in a journal/diary that collects a day, in hand-written morning pages for dreams and recollections, directions and orientations, whilst we are in waiting rooms and hotels; via a scent, a song, or a snapshot that brings back memories. When and where do you write, and about what?

Personally, I am an early bird, I love the quiet of dawn, my loved ones still sleeping and the sky above our apartment building slowly turning pink. The sound of other birds, aeroplanes, of garbage collectors and paper deliverers. The cat who has returned from the day’s first inspection of the stairwell purring on my knee. A morning gift: the promise an unwritten day holds in the wolf hour. Before email and admin, to-do lists and reporting, demands of productivity, before pedagogy and mentoring, reviewing and commenting. There, I sometimes find moments in which to write for the sheer pleasure of it, finding and following a figure who helps me tell other stories. Before the dissonant passionate pieces of a queer life-work balance and puzzle merge into its form, I stay with the trouble of encounters with other others among us who are inhabiting that still dark continent of (queer) femininity. I dwell in minoritarian waves; the pleasures and desires of the queer delta of Venus, explore questions and forms of writing that exceed what I can do with my interviews and survey data, my literature reviews and assessments. Most of those stories remain in my computer.

‘When I do not write, it is as if I had died’ says Hélène Cixous (2008: 51), another feminist writer who likes the early hours (Toni Morrison, too). For me that is certainly true; if I cannot write, I feel dead, without a purpose as a profesora. In her reworking of death in this issue, Redi Kobak also turns to Cixous for inspiration to consider death itself and the emotions, and relations it conjures up and what it means for reflexivity. Writing, insists Cixous (ibid) ‘is the breath, the respiration, it is as imperious as the need to wake up, to touch, to eat, to kiss, to progress’. While Cixous often states that she writes by long hand; my own scribbles are undetectable. Instead: oh, how I love the sound and feeling of my red nails click-click-clicking on the keys of the board, the sound of rain outside my window, of leaves rustling, of neighbours steps as they begin their day. And we do share a love of both stories and screens, the girl and I. Admittedly, for her, it’s more likely a game of fashion design or complex navigation and strategic thinking that allures, whereas for me, the screen is where so much of what I love about what I do happens these days, that reading and writing, the stringing together of words. When the other week this now 6th grader too was writing a novel, reading it out loud to herself, my heart skipped another beat.

Like Cixous, and I’m sure, many of us, I too need to write like I need to breathe and make love, I long for it like I do for my lover when we are apart. It is how I think and make sense, it is how I wish to connect and move. With this collection, we open a space for creative writing in and as feminist research in this journal, with the modest hope that this might point to new beginnings. With the help of you, dear readers and contributors, perhaps we might envision a special issue on writing in the future. Where and when do you find your moments for creativity and vision, if you too do need it? In what forms of writing do you find joy and hope? As someone who reads and writes, what stories do you want to pass on, from your research, your relations to people and ideas, words, and from living a feminist life (Ahmed, 2016)? What makes for and constrains your sense of feminist freedom and what are we passing on, to our brown girls and queer kin? How can we reclaim writing as one way that we resist and endure the current order and imagine elsewheres?