Daniela Muriel
elamuriel@gmail.com
Women’s writing and knowledge have been part of world literature even when women’s voices were anything but heard or recognized. For example, in the Antiquity, Enheduanna appeared as the first writer in history to sign her texts. In the same vein, Safo of Lesbos was deconstructing gender and sexuality in Ancient Greece way before manuals of gender manners (best known as “manuals of etiquette”) were written. However, it is with the feminist movement that women’s writing become a fundamental instrument in the subversion of hegemonic practices and narratives with an incredible vitality and force.
In fact, feminist literature has a radical role in the dispute to make sense of the world. In feminist literature, women’s desire becomes knowledge and destabilizes the narratives of power. Overall, feminist narratives are always looking for new ways to understand reality and create new possibilities to human existence. When feminist literature recognizes and honors the other, when it presents alternatives and new perspectives to the world, it insubordinates and subvert the reality, deconstructing the conventional poetics of patriarchy in diverse formats and stories in a present that needs to be rethought in multiple ways.
This is an invitation to dive into and honor the feminist literature in order to recognize consciously the feminine perspectives of the world, but also to grasp into how women’s writing is a way for women to become active subjects of history and create our own meaning, our own signification. A literature that is made from a place of empathy and awareness that does not believe in heroes but affective bonds, and forwards with no fear to be feared, with no fear to exist out of the need to cancel and invisibilize the other, the different, the multiple; with no fear to dislocates itself while imagines and constructs the world.
This is also an invitation to think together what ever we want, to create bonds between us, as readers and writers, to feed the feminist praxis of thinking through a collective conversation that dislocates the hegemonic knowledge. Ultimately, feminist literature exists to contributes to the world, a world that has been underrepresented in the face of oligarchy. An oligarchy that has institutionalized an auto-destructive and limited civilization that affects us all. This is an invitation to read together emancipatory literature to change the world from the outside and within, from everything that resonates in our bodies and minds.