Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique

Abstract

Building on the pioneering work of Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence (1989), Ellen Berry’s new book examines the work of contemporary women writers, Kathy Acker, Chantal Chawaf, Lynda Barry, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valerie Solanas, and Jeanette Winterson, suggesting that each deploys a deliberate strategy of “literary negation” (1) in their “negative aesthetic texts” (5). Berry argues that all six writers, in different ways, challenge the “normative structures of perception and representation” by presenting “extreme content” by means of “formally radical techniques” (5). Positioning her arguments in the intellectual contexts of the most recent development in critical theory, namely, the “negative or anti-social turn” of queer studies (8), Berry marshals the work of Lee Edelman, Heather Love, and, in particular, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), suggesting that a new feminist critique should follow the insights of queer theory and recognize unconstructive affects such as negativity, shame, and unhappiness as an important part of what Halberstam calls “shadow feminism.” Such a model allows us, suggests Berry, to examine these writers’ refusal of realist form in relation to their focus on failure, negation, and even extreme violence and, further, to understand why the renunciation of redemption and happiness might be regarded as part of a new feminist politics.