Feminist Fiction

Abstract

Relatively few women in Ireland — including some of the ones I discuss in this chapter — would choose to have their work labeled ‘feminist’. The word has become so politically over-determined, so loaded with negative implication by non- and anti-feminist sources, that the term itself is a threat. Which of course, in its positive sense, it should be. Feminism, which would dismantle and re-vision, or at the very least question existing social, emotional and economic structures that are damaging to women, can hardly be comforting to those men or women who either support (and perhaps survive owing to) the status quo, or at least see accommodation as preferable to painful change. But even writers sympathetic to feminist political theory and practice are often wary of the notion of feminist art. When the British journalist Nicci Gerrard interviewed over 50 anglophone women writers in the late 1980s, she found that writer after writer makes an explicit separation between being a feminist and being a feminist author — until it comes as a great relief to come across Angela Carter describing herself as ‘a feminist writer because I’m a feminist in everything else and one can’t compartmentalize these things in one’s life’.3 KeywordsShort StoryBattered WomanIrish WomanSexual Double StandardFeminist Political TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.