Feminist Writing Space

During this unit our class explored definitions and examples of feminist writing space in Cherríe Moraga's and Gloria Anzaldúa's 2001 forewords to the third edition of This Bridge Called My Back, the Combahee River Collective's "A Black Feminist Statement," and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Reflecting on these texts and the students' own development of feminist writing spaces in their writing project #2, students discovered several possible goals and uses for feminist writing space.

Considering our four texts from this unit, students came up with a list of terms and issues to think about when interacting with possible feminist writing spaces:

• returning (to politics, to activism, to conversation) on the pages of your own book (Cherríe Moraga)
  
• using feminist writing space to share information, empowerment, motivation with women (Cherríe Moraga)
  
• writing to share a common experience (Woolf)
  
• writing as a room, writing in need of a room to escape to (Woolf)
  
• writing to think beyond what exists (Anzaldúa)
  
• a text as a refuge for writer and reader (Anzaldúa)
  
• imagining an ideal world through writing (Anzaldúa)
  
• writing to document history (Combahee River Collective)
  
• writing to inform others about feminist work being done (Combahee River Collective)

(Though just about all of these could apply to all of the texts from this unit, we have listed the text that directly raised each issue.)